Anthropic, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI staffers in 2021, has secured a substantial $450M funding round.
Spark Capital led the funding round, joined by Google, Salesforce Ventures, Sound Ventures, and Zoom Ventures. The investment stands as the biggest AI funding round this year after Microsoft's investment in OpenAI in January.
- Anthropic, an OpenAI competitor known for its chatbot Claude, has now raised more than $1.5B, making it among the highest-funded AI startups.
- While Anthropic's exact valuation hasn't been shared publicly, insiders estimate it to be around $5B.
- The latest funding will go toward the development of its Claude, which offers similar conversational capabilities to OpenAI's ChatGPT but purports to be more "user-friendly" and less likely to produce harmful results based on early feedback.
- Zoom, an investor, said it plans to incorporate Anthropic models into its video-conferencing platform.
- In March, Anthropic announced it had secured $300M in funding led by Spark, valuing the company at $4.1B.
- Before that, Google invested a separate $300M to $400M into Anthropic, giving the tech giant a 10% stake.
- Anthropic has also raised funds from notable individuals, including Jaan Tallinn, Skype's founding engineer of Skype, and Sam Bankman-Fried, the former FTX CEO who is now under indictment.