All eyes are on Anthropic this morning as it closed a deal to raise $3.5 billion in fresh capital.
The latest funding round valued the OpenAI rival at a whopping $61.5 billion.
Anthropic’s new milestone underscores continued interest in artificial intelligence startups that many believe will shape the future of technology.
Notable names that participated in Anthropic’s latest round include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, Salesforce Ventures, and Fidelity.
Note that Anthropic is a private company and its shares are not yet available for the public to trade.
How does Anthropic plan on using the new capital?
Anthropic is an Amazon-backed artificial intelligence startup that’s growing at an exceptional rate. Its annual run rate for revenue stood at about $1 billion in the final month of 2024.
But an explosive surge in the popularity of Claude (its advanced AI model) has pushed that number up by 30% year-to-date, as per a source that talked to Bloomberg on condition of anonymity today.
Anthropic plans on using the fresh capital to “expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion in Asia and Europe.”
All in all, the new money will help it “advance the development of next-gen AI system,” according to the company’s press release on Monday.
Anthropic has notable names as clients
Anthropic generates most of its sales from enterprise customers, which include a few notable names like Snowflake, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Zoom, and Thomson Reuters.
In its press release on Monday, the startup also confirmed that Amazon’s Alexa+ is now powered by its AI technology.
The deal is significant for Anthropic as it “brings Claude to millions of households and Prime members.”
Other than Amazon, peer Google is heavily invested in Anthropic as well. In January, the tech titan announced a new agreement of over $1 billion with the AI firm that included a sizable cloud contract as well.
Anthropic has so far not disclosed any plans of going public.
Why are AI startups attracting pompous valuations?
Experts believe the generative artificial intelligence market will continue to grow at a fast pace and hit a valuation of about $1 trillion within the next ten years.
The likes of Microsoft and Amazon are, therefore, investing aggressively in AI startups on top of working on their own technologies to strengthen their hold on that market.
Amazon remains a minority investor in Anthropic even though it has parked some $8 billion in it already. Microsoft, on the other hand, has invested a significantly higher $13 billion so far in rival, OpenAI.
Anthropic has been committed to improving its technology. It’s recently launched Claude 3.7 can “think” as long as the user wants before giving an answer.
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