Anthropic hits a $380B valuation as it heightens competition with OpenAI
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic says it is now valued at $380 billion, cementing its position alongside rival OpenAI and Elon Musk’s SpaceX in a trio of the world’s most valuable startups that investors will be watching closely this year to see if they go public on Wall Street.
“Those are the three biggest names that could go public this year,” said Angelo Bochanis, a partner at Renaissance Capital, who studies the potential for IPOs.
Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, said on Thursday its valuation rose after raising $30 billion in its latest funding round, led by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and U.S. investment firm Coatue, as well as dozens of other major investors.
The funding also includes part of the $15 billion that Nvidia and Microsoft announced investing in Anthropic in November, in a deal that would eventually commit Anthropic to buying from Microsoft some $30 billion in computing capacity it needs to build and run AI systems like Claude. Anthropic has also been strongly supported by cloud providers Amazon and Google.
Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said the company would take advantage of increased investment to continue creating “enterprise-grade products” and AI models.
Renaissance Capital ranks Anthropic as the third most valuable private company. It’s behind ChatGPT creator OpenAI, valued at $500 billion. The two San Francisco-based AI companies follow rocket maker SpaceX, which recently merged with Musk’s AI startup xAI, maker of the Grok chatbot.
Anthropic is unprofitable, but said Thursday it is on track to make $14 billion in revenue over the next year, a rapid increase from “its first dollar of revenue” made less than three years ago. While OpenAI has tried a number of revenue models, including digital advertising, Anthropic has adapted Claude’s products to become a workplace assistant for tasks such as software engineering.
Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees in 2021. Its co-founder and CEO, Dario Amodei, promised to focus more on the security of the better-than-human technology called artificial general intelligence that the two San Francisco companies aimed to build. Anthropic also announced this week the creation of a new $20 million bipartisan organization to influence AI regulation in the United States.
OpenAI first released ChatGPT in late 2022, revealing the enormous commercial potential for large AI language models that could help write emails and computer code and answer questions. Anthropic followed with its first release of Claude in 2023.
Whichever company makes the first IPO will have “the opportunity to raise even more money,” Bochanis said. “It’s an opportunity to make headlines and thus strengthen your public image.”
The risk is that they will have to invite public inspection of their business models as they continue to lose more money than they make.
“Private markets have pumped tens of billions of dollars into these companies, even as valuations multiply and multiply,” Bochanis said. “With the public markets, there’s going to be a little more scrutiny. Just one earnings report could cause a stock to fall.”
