Baseten just closed a billion-five at a thirteen-billion valuation — and it's their fourth fundraise in eighteen months. At some point, the round IS the product. This is Startup Fundraising. Three deals on the tape today — a mega-infra raise, a stealth memory play coming out swinging, and a New Zealand auto parts company nobody's heard of. From Ana-Maria Stanciuc at The Next Web:
Baseten has raised $1.5bn in a Series F round that values the AI infrastructure startup at up to $13bn, a number that arrives barely 18 months and four fundraises into the company’s current growth spurt. The round was led by the US investors Sands Capital and Wellington Management,
Four fundraises in eighteen months to get to $13bn — that's the part I keep circling. Every round leaves a dilution trail, so by Series F, the early checks have been ground down to something you'd need a microscope to find on the cap table. Right, and that velocity is what I want explained. Are they raising $1.5bn because the product needs it, or because the window's open and you grab the money while you can? Sands Capital and Wellington led — which matters. Not a16z, not Founders Fund. And the headline hook is Blackbird out of Australia writing what they're calling their biggest check ever. Biggest check ever, amount undisclosed. Love a record you don't have to put a number on. It's still a clean lead/follow read, though — Sands sets the terms, Blackbird gets the local-hero story because the founders are Australian. Two different jobs on one cap table. So over the next two years, this has to hold up: Baseten sells the plumbing under everyone else's AI, pitched as cheaper than the big providers. At $13bn, that margin had better be real, not a discount they're eating just to win logos. From PR Newswire:
Engram, the company building the learned memory layer for AI, emerged from stealth with $98M in funding from General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Factory, Modern, Amplify Partners, Neo and notable angels and advisors including Assaf Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of Wiz, Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, and Pieter Abbeel, AI and robotics pioneer and co-director of the Berkeley AI Research Lab.
Engram comes out of stealth with $98M, and the partner list is Microsoft, Notion, Harvey. They're partners, not customers, and that word can cover an empty revenue line. And the syndicate is General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, and Sequoia all on one cap table at launch. Hard to call that a lead investor; it reads like a committee. Somebody set those terms and the others chased. Here's my problem with the pitch — they're selling a memory layer to fix wasted tokens. But if that layer runs on Azure, Microsoft's pricing can eat the margin. Right after the Baseten round we just hit — same gravitational pull. The biggest US names pile into the splashiest infrastructure-adjacent bet, and the foreign founder gets the smallest check later in the show. Karpathy and the Wiz CEO on the angel list, the 'learned memory layer' framing — it's a beautifully decorated category that doesn't exist yet. I want to see the unit economics two years from now, when every enterprise already pays Microsoft for a version of the same thing. This one's from SiliconANGLE:
Partly Group Ltd., a New Zealand startup using artificial intelligence to change up the automotive parts business, announced today that it has raised $50 million new funding at a $500 million valuation. It’s also opening its first U.S. operation, betting that the country’s collision repair sector is ready to buy software it has so far had to do without.
Okay, this is the one I've been waiting for all episode. Partly — $50M, $500M valuation, AI for auto parts in collision repair. Out of New Zealand, first US office just opening. After Baseten at $13bn and Engram's whole stealth-launch routine, this is the round I'd actually root for. Auto parts cataloging is operationally brutal and deeply unsexy — nobody pitches a Series whatever on collision repair to look cool. And after a day where the smallest check on the tape belongs to the only non-US founder — there's your concentration issue in miniature. Partly raises $50M, opens in the States, and if their numbers are anywhere near the round size, you're looking at a ten-x revenue multiple. What I want is the cross-border read. A New Zealand cap table raising US dollars at a US valuation, then planting an office here. There's a currency and jurisdiction question sitting under that $500M number that nobody's printing yet. They spent four years and $10 million building Interpreter on vehicle parts data — government records, manufacturer feeds, their own teardowns, parts interpreters annotating by hand. You don't fake that with a wrapper. The moat is all the grunt work. 91% vehicle coverage, 50-plus manufacturer agreements. The valuation either makes total sense or it's insane, and the answer's in auto parts distribution margins — not the AI label. If Startup Fundraising helps you think more clearly about fundraising, take a second to subscribe and leave a review wherever you're listening. It really helps other founders and operators find the show.
You'll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes. So if something's especially relevant to your raise, your board, or your next investor conversation, it's there to dig into.
That's Startup Fundraising for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.