TMTPOST -- OpenAI rival Anthropic was reported to seek a new funding that will drive the artificial intelligence (AI) unicorn into top five most valuable U.S. startups.
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Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $2 billion that would value it at $60 billion, The Wall Street Journal cited people familiar with the matter on Tuesday. The ongoing funding is said to be led by the venture firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, and would make Anthropic the fifth most valuable U.S. startup after SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, and Databricks, according to data provider CB Insights. The reported funding suggests Anthropic’s valuation would more than triple from a year ago, which valued it at $18 billion.
A CNBC report later Tuesday said it confirmed that Anthropic is in late-stage talks to raise up to $2 billion with post-money valuation of $60 billion. The reported echoed The Wall Street Journal that the new funding round is led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. It added that Anthropic’s annualized revenue is around $875 million, which mainly comes from enterprise sales.
Bloomberg the same day report, quoting sources that Anthropic is in talks for fundraising of $2 billion at valuation of $60 billion. Anthropic was reported to be on pace to generate around $875 million in annual revenue. The report also said Anthropic’s major investor Amazon.com. Inc. doesn’t plan to invest additional money beyond those it vowed to input more than a month ago.
Amazon announced last November that it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, bringing the total amount invested to $80 billion. In addition to more investment, Amzon also deepened its collaboration with Anthropic. The AI startup named Amazon Web Services (AWS) its primeary cloud provider and primary training partner. It also started to use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future foundation models. Both companies will continue to work closely to keep advancing Trainium's hardware and software capabilities, according to a statement of Amazon.
Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI research executives in 2021, became famous for its creation of Claude, a large language model (LLM) first released in March 2023. Like its arch rival OpenAI, ANthropic also launched AI chatbot and assistant Claude, which soon gained popularity as businesses incorporate generative AI chatbots across sales, marketing and customer service functions.
The reported new funding round of Anthropic would bring its total raised to $15.7 billion. It is the latest sign that AI startups are forced to launch massive fundraisings to fund the development and scaling their technologies to ensure they don’t fall behind in AI race.
OpenAI unveiled on October 3 last year it has raised $6.6 billion in new funding at a $157 billion post-money valuation. The funding round made OpenAI one of the top three most valued startups across the world, along with SpaceX and ByteDance. The valuation is significantly higher than the $860 billion valuation from the company’s tender offer in February.
A day after announcement of concluding the funding round, OpenAI said it has secured a $4 billion credit facility with from some of global banks including JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Santander, Wells Fargo, SMBC, UBS, and HSBC. “This means we now have access to over $10 billion in liquidity, which gives us the flexibility to invest in new initiatives and operate with full agility as we scale,” OpenAI said in a statement.
Elon Musk’s startup xAI said in November closing a Seies C financing round of $6 billion. As of that month, xAI raised a total of $12 billion since its establishment in March 2023.
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