Anthropic Is Now One of the Most Valuable Startups of All Time: 'Exponential Growth' In a new funding round earlier this week, AI startup Anthropic raised $13 billion at a $183 billion valuation.
By Sherin Shibu Edited by Melissa Malamut
Key Takeaways
- Anthropic has witnessed a sevenfold increase in large clients with projects above $100,000 over the past year, the company says.
- Anthropic's $183 billion valuation moves it closer to rival OpenAI, which had a valuation of $300 billion in March.
- It also places Anthropic near other high-valuation companies, like SpaceX and ByteDance.
Anthropic, the AI startup behind the chatbot Claude, finalized a deal on Tuesday for a new, $13 billion Series F funding round that catapults its valuation from $61.5 billion to $183 billion, making it one of the most valuable startups ever.
Anthropic has more than 300,000 business customers and has seen a sevenfold increase in its number of large clients with projects above $100,000 in the past year, the company said in a statement.
"We are seeing exponential growth in demand across our entire customer base," Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said.
Related: 'We Don't Negotiate': Why Anthropic CEO Is Refusing to Match Meta's Massive 9-Figure Pay Offers
The funding round, which was led by investment firm Iconiq Capital, with Fidelity Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners, was one of the largest financing rounds so far for an AI startup, Bloomberg notes.
Anthropic was initially planning to raise $5 billion, but raised the target to $10 billion following strong demand. The end $13 billion figure arose from more investors wanting to get a stake in the popular startup.
In the statement, Anthropic noted that its run-rate revenue makes it "one of the fastest-growing technology companies in history," skyrocketing from $1 billion at the start of the year to more than $5 billion in August. (Run-rate revenue refers to a company's future annual revenue based on a shorter period of current performance.)
Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei. Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images
Anthropic joins startups like SpaceX (valued at $350 billion in December) and TikTok's parent company, ByteDance (valued at $300 billion in November), in the high valuation club.
While Anthropic may be raising ample funds, its main competitor is further ahead. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, announced in March that it had raised $40 billion in the biggest tech funding round for a private company, elevating its valuation to $300 billion.
Anthropic was founded four years ago by former OpenAI staff and has since differentiated itself from its competitors with an emphasis on AI safety. It launched its chatbot Claude in March 2023 and Claude Code, an AI coding tool that enables users to generate, edit, and debug code, in February.
Creating functional AI is a costly endeavor, requiring startups like Anthropic to raise as much funding as possible. In July 2024, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Norges Bank CEO Nicolai Tangen in an "In Good Company" podcast episode that training an AI model costs around $100 million, but there are models today that cost "more like a billion."
"I think there is a good chance that by [2027] we'll be able to get models that are better than most humans at most things," Amodei said in the podcast.
