From leaving OpenAI to start a business to reaching a valuation of $170 billion, Anthropic has spent four years attracting crazy bets from Silicon Valley giants.

Latest news, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is about to close a new round of financing worth $5 billion, pushing its total valuation to $170 billion.

Following OpenAI, it is the second AI unicorn company to reach a valuation of over $100 billion.

It's worth noting that in March, Anthropic's valuation was only $61.5 billion... In less than half a year, its valuation has nearly tripled to almost three times the previous amount.

Such a terrifying growth rate is putting direct pressure on OpenAI and xAI.

It is reported that both companies have each raised billions of dollars for their data centers and talent reserves this year. OpenAI's latest valuation has reached $300 billion, and Elon Musk has recently been seeking financing for xAI, aiming for a valuation of $200 billion.

Valuation Soars Nearly Threefold in Less Than Half a Year

It has been less than half a year since Anthropic's last round of financing.

In March this year, Anthropic received $3.5 billion in financing led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from a number of new and old investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners and Cisco Investments.

The company's total financing reached an astonishing $18.2 billion, and its total valuation soared to $61.5 billion.

Half a year later, the growth in Anthropic's new round of financing is even more astonishing:

The total financing of approximately $5 billion will push Anthropic's valuation close to $170 billion, second only to OpenAI (approximately $300 billion) and SpaceX (approximately $400 billion).

This round of financing is led by Iconiq Capital, a company that provides wealth management and investment services in the technology sector. Due to its close relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, it is affectionately known as "Zuck's inner circle". (Why is it always you, Zuck?!)

It is expected that Iconiq Capital will invest $1 billion, and Anthropic is also in talks with the Qatar Investment Authority and Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC. There may be a second lead investor.

In addition, Amazon, one of Anthropic's major investors, may also participate in this round of financing as a potential investor.

Lightspeed, the lead investor in the previous round, is also participating in the new round of financing. Other venture capital firms in negotiations include Menlo Ventures and Alkeon Capital Management.

The addition of this capital will help Anthropic expand its R & D scale, accelerate the improvement of model performance, and further consolidate its competitive advantage over OpenAI.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by several former OpenAI employees and received a Series A financing of $124 million from investors such as Skype co - founder Jaan Tallinn and Facebook co - founder Dustin Moskovitz.

In 2022, it completed a Series B financing of $580 million. After the release of Claude in 2023, it won the favor of two Silicon Valley giants, Amazon and Google.

Amazon made multiple consecutive investments within three months and reached a strategic cooperation with Anthropic in September of that year, investing $4 billion directly for a small stake. In 2024, Amazon continued to invest an additional $4 billion, becoming Anthropic's largest investor.

Therefore, Anthropic has clearly designated Amazon's AWS as its main cloud service provider, continuously training and deploying the Claude model on AWS. The two parties have also jointly developed customized AI chips for AWS (Trainium, Inferentia).

Google also invested $300 million in 2023, becoming a shareholder of Anthropic, and has continued to increase its investment in subsequent financing rounds, with a total investment of up to $3 billion.

With this round of financing, Anthropic's total financing will exceed the $20 billion mark.

So why are Silicon Valley giants choosing to bet on Anthropic?

Claude Leads in AI Programming

In short, with Claude in its arsenal, Anthropic has a stronger product moat and greater profit potential.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the world's first hybrid reasoning model, has established a "standard + extended" dual - mode, allowing users to directly control the thinking budget through the API.

In the SWE - bench benchmark test, it outperformed GPT - 4 with scores of 70.3% and 62.3%.

In addition, Claude Opus 4 outperforms GPT - 4 and Gemini 1.0 Ultra in undergraduate and postgraduate - level knowledge, mathematics, and complex task understanding.

Claude Code, launched in February this year, can be deeply integrated with the model and can directly generate multiple types of code based on natural language. It performs quite well in scenarios such as complex problem debugging and test - driven development.

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All of these have enabled Anthropic to firmly dominate the code generation field.

It should be noted that code generation is the main source of income for AI companies because the number of tokens consumed in the process is 10 - 50 times that of ordinary conversations, and the number of tokens directly determines the cost.

According to reports, 70 - 75% of Anthropic's current revenue comes from API call payments, which are directly priced according to the usage of input and output tokens. For example, Claude Sonnet 4 can earn $3 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.

Traditional consumer services, such as the $20 - per - month Claude Pro and the $30 - per - month Claude Team, only account for 10 - 15% of the total revenue.

In addition, its annualized revenue this year has rapidly increased from $1 billion at the beginning of the year to $4 billion, with an average monthly revenue of approximately $333 million. It is expected that by the end of this year, this figure will ultimately reach $9 billion.

The significant increase in its revenue is precisely due to Anthropic's model advantages in code generation, and this advantage is expected to further expand with Anthropic's continuous investment in product R & D.

So, it's no exaggeration to say that Anthropic remains the most - watched AI startup globally outside of OpenAI. And this is being verified in the capital market.

This article is from the WeChat official account “QbitAI”. Author: Focus on cutting - edge technology. Republished by 36Kr with permission.