Anthropic Valuation Hits $183 Billion in New $13 Billion Funding Round
The generative AI model maker initially set out to raise $5 billion but quickly blast through that because of investor demand
AI company Anthropic zipped through its new fundraising, collecting $13 billion in a Series F round at a $183 billion post-money valuation.
New investor Iconiq co-led the financing together with returning backers Fidelity Management & Research and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
A slew of other investment groups, many of them crossover firms that invest in private and public markets, filled out the rest of the syndicate. Anthropic also turned to Middle East capital, including from the Qatar Investment Authority, in this deal.
Anthropic’s valuation nearly tripled since March, when it was worth $61.5 billion.
The company began fundraising earlier this summer. It initially targeted raising $5 billion, but the round generated as much as $25 billion in investor demand, according to a person familiar with the situation.
The company said it would use the capital to meet demand from enterprises, continue safety research and pursue international expansion.
The round indicates a fever pitch of investor demand for top private developers of generative artificial intelligence models, as well as a need for capital at these companies as they face high computing infrastructure costs.
The entire round was made up of primary capital, with no secondary components.
Anthropic’s products include large language models that others use to build AI applications and an AI assistant called Claude, as well as a software development tool called Claude Code.
Anthropic said that its annualized run-rate revenue climbed to more than $5 billion, which is its August revenue times 12. That’s up from about a $1 billion run rate at the start of this year. It has more than 300,000 business customers and its number of large accounts has grown seven times in the past year, the company said.
Claude Code, which was fully launched in May, is generating $500 million in revenue run rate, Anthropic said.
Ron Nachum, co-founder of AI financial analysis startup Sapien, said his company is a big user of Anthropic’s models, especially for coding. “We find that Anthropic is phenomenal in the developer experience, with their models performing fast and being very strong at code generation,” Nachum said. He said Sapien easily changes which models it uses, depending on its needs and the quality of the models. In recent months the majority of the company’s spending has shifted to Anthropic, away from OpenAI and Google, he said.
Anthropic is now fourth among private companies by value globally, behind SpaceX, OpenAI, and ByteDance, according to research firm CB Insights.
Valuations of private-market highflyers are now exceeding historic IPO market caps. Just a handful of tech companies crossed $100 billion in market cap at IPO, on an inflation-adjusted basis, since 1980, according to research by Jay R. Ritter, a scholar at the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida.
Many investors believe that the rate of growth of these companies justifies stratospheric valuations.
“As mobile and cloud demonstrated, large-scale platform shifts have the opportunity to create multitrillion-dollar [total addressable market] opportunities, as existing goods and services are disrupted and novel use cases manifest,” said Mary D’Onofrio, partner at Crosslink Capital, which invested in the Anthropic round. “AI is the shift that we are living through now, and I believe that Anthropic’s round echoes investor and market belief that the company is a market leader in this AI shift—one that can and will become a trillion-dollar company.”
Yet there are others that worry about the sustainability of such business models.
“Anthropic’s $13 billion Series F underscores how frontier [large language model] development has become one of the most capital-intensive endeavors in tech history, requiring infrastructure investments that match or exceed what only Google, Microsoft and Meta could previously afford,” said Jason Saltzman, head of insights at CB Insights.
Significant investors in this financing also included Altimeter, Baillie Gifford, affiliated funds of BlackRock, Blackstone, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, General Atlantic, General Catalyst, GIC, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Insight Partners, Jane Street, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, TPG, T. Rowe Price Associates, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, WCM Investment Management and XN.