Anthropic is now embarking on its Series H funding round to raise another US$50 billion at a whopping US$900 billion valuation. That’s a tad higher than OpenAI’s post-money valuation of US$852 billion following its US$122 billion funding round in March. Anthropic raised US$30 billion in its Series G round at a US$380 billion valuation in February. That’s not counting US$65 billion in funding commitments Claude’s developer has secured from its two top shareholders — search giant Google and e-commerce powerhouse Amazon.com recently. In late April, Google committed to investing up to US$40 billion in Anthropic — an initial US$10 billion in cash to immediately boost computing capacity and US$30 billion linked to future performance targets. Last week, Amazon committed an additional US$5 billion immediately, and up to US$25 billion in total in the future tied to commercial milestones. Amazon also uses Anthropic’s models to power AWS Bedrock, its generative AI cloud platform.
Get ready for another humongous IPO. The US$2 trillion ($2.54 trillion) listing in late June of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which controls satellite broadband giant StarLink with nearly 11,000 satellites orbiting the earth, will be followed by another IPO, at least half as big, four months later. Artificial intelligence (AI) large language model developer Anthropic PBC, a public benefit corporation or a for-profit entity that balances profit-making with a positive impact on society, employees, the community and the environment, is seeking to list in late October to raise at least US$60 billion at a valuation of around US$1.3 trillion. Rival ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which was aiming for a year-end IPO, might now put off its listing until next year.
Anthropic is best known as the developer of Claude, an AI assistant that specialises in reasoning, coding, analysing and summarising long-form content. More recently, Claude has begun disrupting an array of sectors, from software to financial services. “Anthropic is the leader in enterprise AI, a position it has cultivated through focus on commercial applications, particularly code development, safety/responsibility, and distribution across inference providers and developer platforms,” Citigroup tech strategist Heath Terry noted in a recent report. “Sustaining that lead will depend on maintaining technological and product strength while navigating challenges from increasingly enterprise-focused competitors, capacity constraints and pricing for both compute and models,” he said.
