On Monday, Anthropic announced a joint venture focused on deploying enterprise AI services. Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs will be founding partners in the new venture, which will be backed by a group of VCs, hedge funds and private equity firms including Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green and Sequoia Capital.
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported news of the partnership, reported that the new venture was valued at $1.5 billion, including $300 million each from Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman.
The announcement comes as Anthropic’s biggest rival prepares to make a similar move. Just hours before Anthropic’s announcement, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was raising funding for a new venture called The Development Company along very similar lines. OpenAI’s venture will operate at a larger scale, raising $4 billion from 19 investors for a $10 billion valuation. Named investors include TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent, and Bain Capital, but there is no obvious investment overlap between OpenAI Ventures and Anthropic’s competitors.
The overall logic of the two ventures is the same: raise money from alternative asset managers to create new channels for enterprise AI trading. Presumably, the venture company would gain preferential sales access to the investor’s portfolio company, while the investor would capture more value from the resulting deal.
The new capital also allows for more engineering resources to be allocated to individuals, adopting the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model popularized by Palantir.
As Anthropic notes in its announcement, “Engagement can begin with a company’s engineering team talking with clinicians and IT staff to build tools that fit into the workflows that staff already uses. Such engagement will be carried out across industries and across midsize companies, and shaped by the people closest to their work.”
The new venture comes as both AI institutes raise money at a breakneck pace with potential IPOs. At the end of March, OpenAI announced $122 billion in new funding at a valuation of $852 billion. TechCrunch reported last week that Anthropic is finalizing its own funding round, seeking $50 billion in new funding at a $900 billion valuation.
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