Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, is in late-stage talks to raise as much as $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation. The funding round is being led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Amazon, which has backed Anthropic heavily, remaining a minority investor. Anthropic’s annualized revenue is about $875 million, coming mainly from enterprise sales.
Anthropic is the creator of the AI chatbot Claude, which has gained popularity as businesses incorporate generative AI chatbots across sales, marketing, and customer service functions. The company is in a generative AI arms race with tech giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, all vying to stay ahead in a market predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
In November, Amazon announced an additional $4 billion investment in Anthropic, bringing its total investment to $8 billion. Google committed to invest $2 billion in Anthropic last year, and the company will use Amazon Web Services’ Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models moving forward.
Anthropic has been ramping up development throughout last year and introduced its Computer Use capability, which allows its AI agents to use a computer like a human would to complete complex tasks. The company also rolled out Claude Enterprise, its biggest new product since its chatbot’s debut, designed for businesses looking to integrate its AI.