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Anthropic has raised $30bn from investors including GIC, Coatue, Founders Fund and Nvidia, as the AI group plans a significant expansion of its data-centre footprint and prepares for an initial public offering as early as this year.
The new funding round gives Anthropic a $350bn pre-money valuation and equips the Claude maker with the firepower to continue competing with rivals such as Google, Meta and OpenAI.
Anthropic, launched in 2021 by a group of ex-OpenAI researchers, has focused on developing AI tools for businesses. It derives about 80 per cent of its $14bn in revenue run rate — a prediction of annual revenue based on current, short-term performance — from enterprise customers.
The San Francisco-based group’s Claude Code has become the primary coding tool for software engineers since its launch last year. The tool can read a company’s existing code, plan tasks and execute them, and has helped raise Anthropic’s profile with investors.
The start-up claims to have more than 500 customers spending over $1mn a year on its workplace tools, and to have quadrupled business subscriptions to Claude Code since the start of this year.
“Claude is increasingly becoming more critical to how businesses work,” said Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer. “We will use this investment to continue building the enterprise-grade products and models they have come to depend on.”
The funding round includes a portion of the $15bn commitment made by Microsoft and Nvidia late last year as part of a strategic partnership between the groups, though Anthropic did not specify how much.
The remainder of the round was several times subscribed, according to multiple people with knowledge of the process, with a number of investors including US venture investors Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund and Greenoaks, and Singaporean fund Temasek, participating for the first time.
Anthropic raised its funding target by $10bn during the process, with investors keen to back it before it goes public, the FT previously reported.
Unusually for Silicon Valley rivals, Anthropic and OpenAI now share a number of big backers, including Altimeter Capital, MGX, Sequoia and Founders Fund, as well as Nvidia and Microsoft.
OpenAI was also in talks for a new round of funding which could exceed $100bn, according to people with knowledge of that deal, and has launched its own coding agent, Codex, to take on Anthropic.
The two are also competing over researchers and computing resources, with much of the new capital expected to go towards hiring and retaining researchers and securing access to chips.
Anthropic has taken a more conservative approach to infrastructure spending than OpenAI, which has committed to spending well over $1tn on computing resources over the next eight years. Anthropic said on Thursday that it would use the new funds to “power our infrastructure expansion”.
Both start-ups are working towards public listings that could rank among the largest of all time. Anthropic has hired law firm Wilson Sonsini to begin preparations for an IPO.