Baseten, the San Francisco AI inference platform co-founded by Sydney-raised Tuhin Srivastava, has raised US$1.5 billion in Series F, and Blackbird has written its largest-ever single-round cheque (more than US$200m) to back it. For perspective, an entire Blackbird fund in 2012 was just US$30m.

The round was led by Altimeter, Conviction and Spark Capital, completed across two tranches, valuing the company at US$11bn, then US$13bn. It's Baseten's fourth raise in 18 months, taking total capital past US$2 billion. It marks Blackbird's third bet on Srivastava and co-founder Philip Howes, dating back to their 2015 people-analytics startup Shape Analytics.

Baseten sits at the layer that turns trained models into production products — handling GPU orchestration, autoscaling and tooling as enterprises increasingly run custom, post-trained models they own. The traction is astonishing, with revenue up roughly 20x year-on-year, more than one billion inference calls a day across 87 clusters and 18 clouds, and customers including Cursor, Notion, Lovable and Clay.

The fresh capital will fund more compute, software development and talent, with headcount set to triple this year.