The Wall Street Journal reports that Anthropic’s latest funding round would raise its valuation to $60 billion, up from the $18 billion valuation of its $2 billion funding round last year.
Previous investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has also backed rival Mistral, is reportedly leading this latest round with Anthropic keen to scale to compete with its chief competitor OpenAI.
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OpenAI was founded by former OpenAI staff unhappy with the then nonprofit’s deal with Microsoft. Their rival startup would go on to receive billions in backing from Google, Salesforce, and Zoom, with its family of Claude models used by companies all over the world.
Amazon has been one of Anthropic’s main backers, investing a total of $4 billion into the startup and providing it with access to hardware to train new Claude models.
AWS is even building Anthropic an “UltraCluster” supercomputing system made up of its custom Trainium2 UltraServers under Project Rainier.
SK Telecom has also previously backed the startup, investing $100 million in Anthropic in 2023 with joint efforts to create Korean language-based large language models.
SKT and Anthropic jointly developed a Telco LLM system used to power customer service centre tools designed to enhance agents' handling of customer queries.
Anthropic rival OpenAI closed what was the largest venture capital round in history last October, raising $6.6 billion — though Elon Musk alleged the ChatGPT developer engaged in “anticompetitive conduct” when organising the raise.
