Anthropic nears trillion-dollar valuation in latest funding round, beats OpenAI
San Francisco, May 29
,: American AI startup Anthropic has reached close to a trillion-dollar valuation, surpassing its rival OpenAI even as both prepare for their stock market debut.
In a latest funding round, the Claude maker raised $65 billion, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $965 billion post-money.
Claude's adoption has continued to grow across global enterprises customers and the AI giant's run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month, the company said.
"Claude is increasingly indispensable to our growing global community of customers, and we work tirelessly to make tools like Claude Code and Cowork more helpful, more powerful, and more adaptable to their needs," said Krishna Rao, Chief Financial Officer of Anthropic.
The latest funding round will help the company in advancing its safety and interpretability research, expand compute to meet growing demand for Claude, and scale the products and partnerships customers rely on, the company said in a blogpost.
"This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens," Rao added.
Significant investors in this round include AMP PBC, Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, D.E. Shaw Ventures among others. Joining the slate of marquee investors are infrastructure partners Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix.
The AI player estimates a revenue of $10.9 billion, more than double the previous one. The company is expected to report its first operating profit in the June quarter.
Anthropic is fast ramping up its compute capacity as it expands its operations and with demand for Claude gaining momentum.
"We signed agreements with Amazon for up to five gigawatts of new capacity, with Google and Broadcom for five gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity, and with SpaceX for access to GPU capacity in Colossus 1 and Colossus 2," the company's blogpost said.
Claude is available on all three of the world's largest cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
"Startups and Global 5000 companies alike are deploying Claude to handle complex workflows, and in doing so, Claude is learning how businesses actually operate: the context, the processes, the judgment," said Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia Capital.
OpenAI had raised a massive $122 billion in March valuing the company at $852 billion.
— ANI
Reader Comments
All these funding rounds and valuations are impressive but I'm more concerned about the data privacy aspect. With so many Indian companies adopting Claude through AWS, Azure etc., we need stronger guarantees that our data won't be used to train their models. The Indian government should step in with clear regulations.
Finally some good news from the AI world! 🎉 Claude has been genuinely helpful for my academic research. The code generation and data analysis features are miles ahead of other tools. Happy to see an AI company focusing on safety research too - that's what we need in India given our diverse languages and contexts.
I work in IT consulting and we've been testing Claude for client projects. The thing is, while it's great for English, it's not as good with Hindi or other Indian languages compared to some local AI startups. Anthropic needs to invest more in Indic language capabilities if they want serious adoption here.
Trillion dollar valuations while most Indians can barely afford basic internet? The digital divide is getting worse. These AI companies should allocate some of that massive funding to make their tools accessible in rural India and smaller towns. Otherwise it's just another tech bubble benefiting the elite. 🌏
As someone who's built AI products, I find the infrastructure deals fascinating - 5 gigawatts each with Amazon and Google? That's data center capacity bigger than some small countries! But I wonder about the environmental impact. Hope they're using renewable energy. India's AI ecosystem should learn from this but also be mindful of sustainability.
We welcome thoughtful discussions from our readers. Please keep comments respectful and on-topic.