Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favorite stories in this weekly newspaper.
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 early this year.
The new funding round gives Anthropic a pre-money valuation of $350 billion and equips the cloud maker with the ability to continue competing with rivals like Google, Meta and OpenAI.
Launched in 2021 by a group of ex-OpenAI researchers, Anthropic focuses on developing AI tools for businesses. It gets about 80 percent of its $14 billion revenue run rate – a forecast of annual revenue based on current, short-term performance – from enterprise customers.
The San Francisco-based group’s Cloud 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 among investors.
The start-up claims more than 500 customers are spending more than $1 million a year on its workplace tools, and Cloud Code’s business subscriptions have quadrupled since the beginning of this year.
“The cloud is becoming increasingly important to how businesses work,” said Krishna Rao, chief financial officer of Anthropic. “We will use this investment to continue building the enterprise-grade products and models they rely on.”
The funding round includes a portion of a $15 billion 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 remaining portion of the round was oversubscribed, 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 Singapore fund Temasek participating for the first time.
The FT previously reported that Anthropic has raised its funding target to $10 billion during the process, with investors keen to support it before it goes public.
Unusually for Silicon Valley rivals, Anthropic and OpenAI now share several 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 that could exceed $100 billion, according to people with knowledge of that deal, and has launched its own coding agent, Codex, to compete with Anthropic.
The two are also competing over researchers and computing resources, with the majority of the new capital expected to be spent on hiring and retaining researchers and gaining access to chips.
Anthropic has taken a more conservative approach to infrastructure spending than OpenAI, which has committed to spending more than $1 trillion on computing resources over the next eight years. Anthropic said Thursday it would use the new funds to “power the expansion of our infrastructure.”
Both the start-ups are working towards a public listing which could be one of the biggest ever. Anthropic has hired law firm Wilson Sonsini to begin preparations for its IPO.
