Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is seeking to raise at least $2 billion in fresh funding just days after securing a $1.25 billion investment from Amazon, according to sources familiar with the matter.
According to an Oct. 3 report from The Information, the new round of financing could value Anthropic at $20 billion to $30 billion, quintupling its valuation since March when investors pegged the company at $4 billion. The lofty valuation exceeds that of rival OpenAI in terms of its multiple on revenue.
Anthropic, founded just two years ago, is the creator of Claude, an AI chatbot that competes directly with OpenAI’s wildly popular ChatGPT. The startup has been talking with investors and expects Google, which acquired a 10% stake in 2022, to participate in the latest funding round, unspecified sources said.
The massive cash infusion comes as Anthropic ramps up efforts to develop more powerful AI models beyond Claude. According to leaked documents, the company aims to build Claude Next, an AI system ten times more capable than existing models that would require computing power exceeding today’s most advanced supercomputers.
To achieve this goal, Anthropic has been locking in partnerships with tech giants like Amazon Web Services, which agreed last week to provide cloud infrastructure and services valued up to $4 billion. The deal makes Amazon the “primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads” for Anthropic as it scales up Claude Next and other models.
The party-round financing approach allows Anthropic to tap into the technical capabilities and cloud resources of strategic investors like Amazon and Google. While still in the early stages, Claude has emerged as a leading competitor to ChatGPT and other OpenAI products.
