From Airbnb to Anthropic: How Krishna Rao Became AI's Most Important Money Man

When Anthropic needed someone to handle its money and fuel its ambitions, it turned to Krishna Rao. Appointed as the AI startup's first Chief Financial Officer in May 2024, Rao has since become one of the most important, and least talked about, figures in the global artificial intelligence race.

Rao's arrival coincided with a turning point for Anthropic. The company was just beginning to earn meaningful revenue when he came on board. What followed was a period of explosive growth. Demand for its Claude AI models surged, revenues soared and Anthropic's valuation climbed to heights few had anticipated.

Today, the company is reportedly in talks to raise $30 billion at a valuation of $900 billion. Rao began talks with prospective backers within the last two weeks, according to the Financial Times. In April, Anthropic said its run-rate revenue surpassed $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025. That figure is now said to be reaching $45 billion. This would place Anthropic ahead of rival OpenAI, which closed its latest funding round at a post-money valuation of $852 billion in March 2026. Both firms are also racing toward potential public market offerings that could come as soon as later this year.

A Man Who Has Done This Before

The 43-year-old Rao grew up in a middle-class family in California and is known for maintaining a low public profile, rarely speaking about his personal life or career journey. A summa cum laude economics graduate from Harvard University in 2005, he later earned a law degree from Yale Law School in 2011.

He began his career at Bain & Company before moving to Blackstone, where he worked as a Principal in its Private Equity Group in New York, leading deals across sectors ranging from retail to financial technology, including Blackstone's $200 million investment in Crocs in 2013. He later joined Airbnb as Finance Director, where his most significant test came during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the travel industry in freefall, Rao helped secure $2 billion in emergency funding and steered the company to a $47 billion IPO in December 2020, one of the most watched stock market debuts of that year. Stints as CFO at Cedar and Fanatics Commerce followed before Anthropic came calling.

Though he rarely speaks publicly, Rao opened up in a recent podcast appearance with venture capitalist Patrick O'Shaughnessy about a defining moment in his personal story, a "profound act of sacrifice" by his elder brother, who got into every college he applied to but chose to attend an in-state college so the family would have the resources to support Rao's education wherever he wanted to go.

The results under his watch speak for themselves. Anthropic's annualised revenue run rate jumped from $87 million in January 2024 to $1 billion by December, a remarkable climb in under a year. Two years on, the pressure has only intensified. The company has had to grapple with growing pains, including frequent outages and tightening usage limits, even as it aggressively strikes deals to expand its compute capacity to meet surging global demand for Claude.

The Compute Question

Earlier this month, Anthropic signed an agreement with SpaceX to use all computing capacity at the latter's Colossus 1 data centre, gaining access to 300 megawatts and 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. The firm has also expressed interest in developing multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity with SpaceX. This follows similar deals with Amazon, Google, Broadcom, and Microsoft. Over the past year, Anthropic has also set up its first India office in Bengaluru and launched a $1.5 billion venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and Hellman & Friedman to deploy Claude for mid-sized businesses across healthcare, manufacturing, and financial services.

In the same podcast conversation, Rao described compute procurement as among the "most consequential and hardest decisions to make in the entire company," adding that he now spends 30% to 40% of his time on it. "Compute that we procure is the lifeblood of our business. If you buy too much, you go out of business. If you buy too little, you can't serve your customers and you're not at the frontier," he said.

He also spoke about learning to think exponentially rather than incrementally, and about building flexibility into compute deals to extract maximum value. "We are customers of Amazon's Tranium chip, Google's TPUs, and Nvidia's GPUs. We have invested in that flexibility over multiple years to become, I believe, the most efficient users of compute among the frontier AI labs," he said.

The road has not been entirely smooth. Rao has had to manage legal friction with the US government after the Pentagon raised concerns about Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, stemming from a dispute over an AI safety guardrail.