AI startup Anthropic reportedly in talks to raise $750M on a $15B valuation

AI

Amazon.com Inc. and Google LLC-backed artificial intelligence startup Anthropic PBC is reportedly in talks to raise $750 million in new funding on a valuation of $15 billion, according to a report from The Information and later a report from Bloomberg.

The report claims that Menlo Ventures Management L.P. will lead the round. Although a valuation of $15 billion is being discussed, the final valuation on the deal could go above $18 billion. Neither Anthropic nor Menlo Ventures has yet commented on the report.

Founded in 2020 by former OpenAI LP researchers, Anthropic builds generative artificial intelligence software. Its most recent model, Claude 2, is designed to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4 and can generate marketing copy, solve mathematical problems and turn natural language prompts into software code.

Among competitors in the AI market, Claude 2 differs in its ability to process prompts containing 100,000 tokens, a unit in AI corresponding to characters and numbers. The higher the number, the more data that can be processed. By comparison, GPT-4 can process only 8,000 tokens, giving Claude 2 a higher capacity to summarize long documents that other large language models cannot process.

The new round, should it take place, probably won’t be Anthropic’s last. Starting with a funding round of $124 million Series A in May 2021, which included individual investors such as former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, the company has raised multiple rounds since.

The previous rounds include:

• $580 million Series B in April 2022 in a round led by Sam Bankman-Fried, the soon-to-be-jailed former head of FTX Trading Ltd., with participation from the Center for Emerging Risk Research and several individual investors.
• $300 million from Google on a $4.1 billion valuation in March.
• $450 million Series C in May 2023 in a round led by Spark Capital that included Zoom Video Communications Inc., Salesforce Ventures LLC, Microsoft Corp., HOF Capital LLC, Menlo Ventures, Sound Ventures LLC, Pioneer Fund Inc., Wikus Capital Inc., GG1978 LLC, SV Angel LLC and Alphabet Inc.
• A commitment of more than $1 billion from Sapphire Ventures LLC in June.
• $100 million from South Korean telecommunications giant SK Telecom Co. Ltd. in August.
• A commitment of up to $4 billion from Amazon in September.
• A commitment of up to $2 billion from Google in October.

Anthropic was last in the news in November, not for raising new funding for a novel change, but for the release of Claude 2.1. The new chatbot includes advances in core features with significantly improved safety, a much larger context window and a new third-party tool use feature.

Image: Anthropic