Angela Jiang, Anthropic's Head of Product Claude Platform, and Katelyn Lesse, Head of Engineering Claude Platform, in London, England on May 19.Michael Knief/The Associated Press
Anthropic said on Thursday it has raised US$65-billion at a post-money valuation of US$965 billion, as it seeks to expand computing capacity to meet growing demand for chatbot Claude and scale its products.
The new valuation after the series H funding round puts Anthropic ahead of rival OpenAI, which was last valued at US$852-billion post-money in March.
“Since our series G in February, adoption has continued to grow across global enterprise customers, and our run-rate revenue crossed US$47-billion earlier this month,” Anthropic said in a blog on its website. It was valued at US$380 billion in February, after raising US$30-billion.
Anthropic’s pursuit of private funding coincides with preparations for a public listing, according to investors and bankers familiar with the company.
Anthropic nears first quarterly profit as sales eclipse enormous costs of developing AI
Both Anthropic and OpenAI are planning to tap the public market, possibly as quickly as this year, to acquire the computational resources necessary to power their services and train new models.
Anthropic has struggled to meet demand in recent months, forcing it to institute usage limits during peak hours and incentivize off-peak use by offering more compute during those hours.
Its latest funding round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, with Coatue and ICONIQ as co-leads, among others.
Anthropic’s strategic infrastructure partners Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix also joined the investment round.
The round comprises US$15-billion of previously committed investments from hyperscalers, including US$5-million from Amazon.
Amazon had said in April it would invest up to US$25-billion in Anthropic, as the AI startup commits to spending more than US$100-billion over the next 10 years on Amazon’s cloud technologies. This is in addition to the US$8-billion Amazon previously invested in the company.