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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 Company, General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners and Jane Street, among others.
Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup backed heavily byĀ 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.
News of the latest funding round after GoogleĀ 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’sĀ past investments of $2 billionĀ 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.
In December, Anthropic’s revenue hit an annualized $1 billion, which was an increase of roughly 10x year over year, a source told CNBC at the time. The company’s revenue comes primarily from enterprise sales.
The generative AI market, which includes Anthropic and OpenAI as well as Google, Amazon,Ā MicrosoftĀ andĀ Meta, isĀ predicted to top $1 trillionĀ in revenue within a decade. Amazon and Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s principal investor, areĀ backing generative AI startups with hefty investmentsĀ as well as developing their own technologies.
AmazonĀ 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 startupĀ saidĀ thatĀ 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.
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