Artificial Intelligence startup Anthropic is in talks to raise an additional $2 billion in a funding round that will value the company at $60 billion. This comes months after the startup has raised $4 billion funding from Amazon, Reuters reported.
The new funding round is of $6 billion in total and is reportedly led by Venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners. If the deal is successful at the reported valuation, it would make Anthropic the fifth most valuable U.S. startup after SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe and Databricks, according to data provider CB Insights.
The reported current valuation of $60 billion is an increase from the $18 billion at which the start-up was valued in a 2024 funding round.
Menlo first invested in Anthropic in the $450 million Series C in 2023 in a funding led by Spark Capital. Menlo Ventures led the $750 Series D in 2024.
In November 2024, Amazon pumped in another $4 billion in the start-up to double its investment in the company to $8 billion. Anthropic also integrated Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their primary cloud and training partner.
Through this investment Amazon signed its name in the generative AI race featuring Anthropic and OpenAI.
OpenAI vs Anthropic
Co-founded by former OpenAI executives, San Francisco-based Anthropic is a premier participant in the race that includes giants like xAI, Google Deepmind and Perplexity. With fresh investments, Anthropic will look to upgrade and strengthen models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI triggered a generative AI model race after it launched Chat-GPT in November 2022. The growing popularity of the company and new product launches helped it close a $6.6 billion funding round in October 2024, potentially taking its valuation to $157 billion.
With outsized funding rounds by companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI, AI startups have accounted for nearly 50 per cent of the venture capital dollar raised in the U.S. last year, as per the data by PitchBook.
What is Anthropic?
Anthropic is an AI startup company that focuses on developing large language models and general AI systems. One of Anthropic's notable products is Claude, a primary competitor to OpenAI’s chatbot Chat-GPT.
