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Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei (left) and Daniela Amodei. (Anthropic Photo)
Anthropic is adding more rocket fuel to its engine as the high-flying San Francisco startup behind the Claude chatbot and AI platform raised another $3.5 billion at a whopping $61.5 billion valuation.
This comes after Anthropic announced a $4 billion investment from Amazon in November. Amazon had already invested $4 billion in the company previously.
A spokesperson confirmed that Amazon’s investments were not part of the latest round announced this week.
Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI research execs, is one of the highest valued tech startups in the world.
Claude is used by a number of businesses including Zoom, Snowflake, and Cursor, and also helps power Amazon’s new Alexa+ digital assistant.
Anthropic had an annual revenue run rate of about $1 billion as of late last year, according to Bloomberg.
The company last year opened an office in Seattle, mainly focused on engineering, and has about 40 employees in the city. It’s one of more than 100 tech companies that have satellite offices in the Seattle region, aiming to tap into the region’s rich talent pool.
Anthropic employees based in Seattle include, among others:
Brian Delahunty, head of engineering, who was previously an engineering chief at Nearside and Stripe
Eric Burns, member of technical staff and the former CEO at Panopto
Devin Whittle, head of finance and strategy, previously CFO at GitHub
Yue Ning, member of technical staff, former engineering leader at Typeface
Andy Stewart, member of technical staff, former manager at Cruise and Amazon.
Shu Wu, member of technical staff, former engineering manager at Apple
Tim Sullivan, member of technical staff, previously vice president of engineering at Panopto
The company has several open jobs in Seattle.
Seattle has become a hub for AI technologies, building on the cloud computing prowess of Microsoft and Amazon and their connections to startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic. There’s also the Allen Institute for AI; the AI2 Incubator; the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science; and AI Tinkerers, a global community of AI practitioners that got its start in Seattle.
OpenAI, which has a key partnership with Microsoft, also recently opened an office in the Seattle region.
Lightspeed Venture Partners led Anthropic’s latest round, which included participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.
With the new funding, Anthropic said it will “advance its development of next-generation AI systems, expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion.”
Google recently agreed to invest another $1 billion in Anthropic, CNBC reported last month.
