The top AI labs continue to see their valuations rise to stratospheric levels.
Anthropic, the maker of the Claude series of models, has raised $3.5 billion in a fresh funding round. The round values Anthropic at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, among other new and existing investors.
“With this investment, Anthropic will advance its development of next-generation AI systems, expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion,” Anthropic said in a blogpost.
Anthropic had released its Claude Sonnet 3.7 model last week to largely positive reviews. The model is thought to be one of the best coding models around, and is used in popular coding tools like Cursor. Anthropic said that global companies including Zoom, Snowflake and Pfizer were using Claude in their operations. “Replit integrated Claude into “Agent” to turn natural language into code, driving 10X revenue growth; Thomson Reuters’ tax platform CoCounsel uses Claude to assist tax professionals; Novo Nordisk has used Claude to reduce clinical study report writing from 12 weeks to 10 minutes; and Claude now helps to power Alexa+, bringing advanced AI capabilities to millions of households and Prime members, Anthropic said.
Anthropic’s $61.5 billion valuation makes it the second most valuable AI lab. OpenAI was valued at $157 billion last year. Meanwhile, Ilya Sutskever’s SSI is valued at $30 billion, and former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines is valued at $11 billion. Perplexity, as per its last fundraise, was valued at around$10 billion.
Apart from OpenAI, these are all relatively new companies — SSI and Thinking Machines aren’t even a year old. But these AI companies now command valuations that startups once took years and decades to build. But such has been the impact of AI — the technology looks poised to change the world as we know it, and the companies leading the charge are rewarded by markets and investors with some eye-popping valuations.