Anthropic closes funding round valuing company at $61.5B

Amazon and Google-backed AI startup Anthropic has secured $3.5 billion in its latest funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, pushing its valuation to $61.5 billion.

Investors include Bessemer, Cisco, Fidelity, Salesforce and D1 Capital Partners.

Founded by former OpenAI executives, Anthropic launched AI chatbot Claude in March 2023, competing with ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. It recently offered the Claude 3.7 Sonnet reasoning model that helps simplify AI interactions.

Anthropic reportedly made $1 billion in revenue last year, mainly through enterprise sales and increased subscriptions to Claude. Its clients include Zoom, Snowflake, Pfizer, Thomson Reuters and Novo Nordisk.

At the same time, it is also heavily spending on developing its AI systems and is expected to burn through $3 billion this year, according to The Information.

The new funds will be used to increase computational capacity and to expand in Europe and Asia.