AI inference infrastructure startup Baseten is reportedly nearing the close of a $1.5 billion funding round that would value the company at $13 billion. The raise follows closely on the heels of Baseten's previous major round, reflecting surging investor appetite for the infrastructure layer beneath AI deployments. As capital shifts from model training toward scalable model serving, inference platforms are commanding some of the sector's largest valuations.
Latent Space interviews Anjney Midha, a prominent AI investor who has led funding rounds at Anthropic, Mistral, Black Forest Labs, and Periodic Labs. Midha shares his personal journey from humble beginnings in Singapore to becoming a key figure in AI venture capital. The conversation also surfaces what the podcast bills as "the AMP secret master plan," offering a rare look at the thesis behind his current venture.
French AI company Mistral AI has announced a major fundraising round of €1.7 billion, one of the largest capital raises in European AI history. The funds are earmarked to accelerate the company's technological progress across research, compute, and product development. The round reinforces Mistral's position as the leading European challenger to US and Chinese frontier AI labs, with significantly expanded financial runway to scale its open-weight and proprietary model efforts.
A wave of aggressive enterprise AI adoption — dubbed 'tokenmaxxing' — has given way to a painful cost reckoning, with Uber burning through its annual AI budget in months and companies rolling back Claude licenses. NEA partner Tiffany Luck dissects these dynamics in a wide-ranging TechCrunch podcast conversation. The discussion spans the coming wave of AI IPOs, the rise of personal agents, and whether organizations can demonstrate genuine ROI from their AI investments.
According to the latest reports, AI startup Anthropic has seen explosive revenue growth and is actively engaged in negotiations for a new funding round…