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Inference Raises $2.3B, OpenAI Delays IPO & Europe's €980M Deep-Tech Week
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Baseten hits $13B, Groq survives a founder exit with $650M, and OpenAI pushes its IPO to 2027 — all in one week. Europe's Alan and Stark close nearly €1B combined as the inference layer gets capitalized at scale.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Baseten just closed one point five billion dollars. That's its fourth fundraise in eighteen months, and it values the company at thirteen billion dollars.
Groq's raise this week tells a different but related story. Six hundred fifty million dollars for an AI inference cloud startup.
Pull back from the infrastructure layer and the picture gets more complicated. OpenAI is now considering pushing its IPO to twenty twenty-seven at the earliest.
SpaceX debuted on June twelfth at one hundred fifty dollars per share, briefly surged past two hundred, and has since declined back to the one hundred fifty range. For what was billed as the largest IPO in history, that's a flat exit for early buyers.
Away from the US market noise, two European rounds deserve attention. Alan, the Paris health insurance startup, closed four hundred eighty million euros in a Series G led by Prosus, reaching a five point five billion euro valuation.
There are two real watchpoints coming out of this cycle. First, whether Baseten and Groq can demonstrate unit economics that justify their inference-layer valuations against cloud providers who can bundle and subsidize the same capability.
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