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Anthropic on Monday closed its latest funding round at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed to CNBC.
The $3.5 billion round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and other investors included Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Investments, Fidelity Management & Research Co., General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners and Jane Street, among others.
Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup backed heavily by Amazon, was founded by former OpenAI research executives. It launched Claude in March 2023, and like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Claude has exploded in popularity as businesses incorporate generative AI chatbots across sales, marketing and customer service functions.
The startup plans to use the latest funding 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 release.
In December, Anthropic’s revenue hit an annualized $1 billion, which was an increase of roughly 10 times year over year, a person who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the confidential nature of the numbers told CNBC at the time. The company’s revenue comes primarily from enterprise sales, and its clients currently include startups like Cursor, Codeium and Replit, as well as larger businesses like Zoom, Snowflake, Pfizer, Thomson Reuters and Novo Nordisk, the company behind Ozempic, according to a release.
Anthropic also spotlighted in its release about the funding round that its technology now fuels Amazon’s Alexa+, “bringing Claude to millions of households and Prime members.”
Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s CFO, said in a release 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.”
News of the latest funding round comes after Google in January agreed to a new investment of more than $1 billion in Anthropic, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to CNBC at the time. The fresh funding built on Google’s past investments of $2 billion in Anthropic and 10% ownership stake in the startup, as well as a large cloud contract between the two companies. Anthropic is most well known for its Claude AI chatbot.
The generative AI market, which includes Anthropic and OpenAI as well as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade. Amazon and Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s principal investor, are backing generative AI startups with hefty investments as well as developing their own technologies.
Amazon announced that it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic in November. That brought Amazon’s total investment in the startup to $8 billion. Amazon remains a minority investor, Anthropic confirmed to CNBC at the time, and does not have a board seat.
As part of the November investment, Amazon Web Services became Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner.” Anthropic has used Amazon Web Services’ Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models since then.
Anthropic ramped up its technology development throughout last year, and in October, the startup said that its AI agents were able to use computers like humans can to complete complex tasks. Anthropic’s Computer Use capability allows its technology to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing, the startup said.
