AI startup Anthropic closed its latest funding round, raising $3.5 billion. This exceeded their original goal of raising $2 billion.
The investment round, which valued the AI startup at $61.5 billion, was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with other investors including Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Investments, Fidelity Management & Research Co., General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners and Jane Street.
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Anthropic, which is backed by Amazon, was founded by former OpenAI executives in 2021. It is best known for its AI chatbot Claude, which like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini has become intensely popular with the AI boom.
In 2024, Anthropic was valued at $18 billion with investors like Menlo Ventures, Amazon and Alphabet backing the startup. Reportedly, Anthropic’s annualized revenue is about $875 million and comes chiefly from enterprise sales. Lightspeed, another existing investor in Anthropic, declined to comment on the current round, according to the company’s statement.
Anthropic plans to use the funds to advance its development of next-generation AI, particularly to “expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion in Asia and Europe,” according to a media release.
Anthropic also mentioned that its technology now fuels Amazon’s Alexa+, “bringing Claude to millions of households and Prime members.” CFO Krishna Rao said that the latest investment “fuels our development of more intelligent and capable AI systems that expand what humans can achieve” and that “continued advances in scaling across all aspects of model training are powering breakthroughs in intelligence and expertise.”
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The generative AI market, which includes Anthropic and OpenAI as well as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, is expected to cross $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
Amazon announced that it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic in November 2024, bringing its total investment to $8 billion. Amazon remains a minority investor.