Anthropic has shut down its latest funding round, securing $3.5 billion and pushing its post-money valuation to $61.5 billion, the company confirmed with CNBC. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Investments, Fidelity Management & Research Co., General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners, Jane Street and more.
Funding News comes more than a week after the Wall Street Journal reported that the four-year-old AI startup had shut down in a $3.5 billion round and its valuation was pushed to $61.5 billion. Anthropic, the company behind Claude Chatbot, continues to attract major investors by betting on the future of artificial intelligence.
The artificial intelligence startup heavily supported by Amazon was founded by former Openai executives. Since launching Claude in March 2023, the company has been attracting attention alongside Google’s Gemini, as it has been looking for AI-driven solutions across sales, marketing and customer service, along with Openai’s ChatGpt and Google’s Gemini.
With this fresh capital, humanity plans to expand its AI efforts. The company outlined its focus on expanding computing power, advances in AI interpretability and coordination research, and accelerated international growth in Asia and Europe.
“This investment will help humanity develop next-generation AI systems, expand its computing power, deepen its research into mechanical interpretability and consistency, and accelerate international expansion,” Humanity said in a news release.
Billion Dollar Revenue Milestone
In December, human revenues reached $1 billion a year, according to sources who spoke to CNBC while anonymous. Most of that revenue comes from corporate sales, ranging from startups like Cursor, Codeum, and Replica to big companies like Zoom, Snowflake, Ffizer, Thomson Reuters, and Novo Nordisk (the company behind Ozempic).
Humanity was highlighted in the funding announcement that its technology drives Amazon’s Alexa+, bringing Claude to millions of households and key members.
Big Tech’s AI Arms Race
Humanity’s CFO Krishna Rao framed the funds as a push to build more intelligent AI systems that expand what is possible for businesses and individuals. “The continuous advancement in scaling across all aspects of model training is to promote breakthroughs in intelligence and expertise,” he said.
Anthropic’s latest salary increases follow Google’s additional $1 billion investment in January. Google previously poured $2 billion into the startup, securing 10% ownership and locking up a massive cloud agreement between the two companies.
Amazon also doubled its bets and announced a $4 billion investment in humanity in November, bringing its total funding commitment to $8 billion. Despite this, Amazon remains a minority investor with no board sheets. As part of the agreement, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become humanity’s leading cloud and training partner, and Startup has trained and deployed the most advanced AI models using AWS training and recommended chips.
Beyond chatbots, advance AI
Humanity is strengthening its research on AI. Last October, the company introduced the AI agent’s ability to autonomously operate computers, completing tasks such as button selection, text entry, website viewing, and interacting with software.
With a $1 trillion AI market forecast within the next decade, the high-tech giants, including Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Google, are racing to dominate the space. Openai continues to be a leader in enterprise AI recruitment, but humanity has made a strong claim as a key player.
For now, with a fresh capital, the company is moving forward with bigger AI ambitions, stronger infrastructure and a growing global footprint.
The rise of the meteor of humanity
San Francisco-based humanity is recognized for advances in AI generated as a strong competitor for industry leaders like Openai. Its flagship chatbot, Claude, is gaining momentum and shows impressive features in a variety of use cases.
Humanity was founded in 2021 by former Openai executives, Dario Amodei (CEO), Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, and Tom Brown. Driven by the transformational possibilities of Generated AI, Dario, and Daniela Amodei, it created a “manipulable, interpretable, robust large-scale AI system.” Before launching humanity, Daniela Amodei served as Vice President of Open Safety and Policy
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