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Four-year-old artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic has raised $3.5bn in a deal that triples its valuation to more than $60bn, as it aims to keep pace with OpenAI and ahead of newer rivals including China’s DeepSeek.
The investment comes a week after Anthropic launched its “most intelligent” model to date, named Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and will be spent on computing resources to develop new models, as well as international expansion in Asia and Europe.
The funding round, which was several times subscribed, suggests that investors remain bullish on about the potential for heavily lossmaking AI start-ups to continue their rapid growth, despite fears that rivals including DeepSeek are closing the gap with cheaper models and that the highly sophisticated technology is quickly becoming commoditised.
The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, which invested $1bn into Anthropic, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deal. Other investors include Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Jane Street and Salesforce Ventures.
Anthropic is already backed by big tech groups Amazon and Google, both of which have committed billions of dollars to the start-up, which is building advanced AI models primarily for use by businesses.
The company was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI employees. Anthropic has since differentiated itself from rivals by emphasising model safety. Its set of “Claude” models are among the most capable in the world, rivalling OpenAI’s GPT series, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama in a number of independent evaluations, and outperform those in areas including coding.
Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer, said: “This investment fuels our development of more intelligent and capable AI systems that expand what humans can achieve, while deepening our understanding of how these systems work.”
The pace of AI investment has become increasingly frenzied over the past two years, since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. OpenAI is in the process of raising $40bn from SoftBank and other investors, while Elon Musk’s xAI raised more than $10bn last year.
Safe Superintelligence, a company launched last year by OpenAI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever, was in talks to raise capital at a valuation of $30bn or more, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deal. It has not yet announced a product.
Anthropic initially sought to raise about $2bn, according to people familiar with the talks, but ultimately raised $3.5bn at a $61.5bn valuation.
“We’re extremely excited by the consistent exponential growth in AI,” said Ravi Mhatre, a Lightspeed partner and co-founder. “[Anthropic] understand intelligence as a product, recognising that enterprise success will be a critical factor for delivering ongoing resources and proving grounds for transformative AI development.”
