Anthropic, which is preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) this year, was valued at $965 billion (about 1,445 trillion won), surpassing rival OpenAI for the first time.
Anthropic said on the 28th (local time) that it raised $65 billion (about 97 trillion won) in its recent Series H funding round. Its post-money valuation was assessed at $965 billion. That is about 2.5 times the company's $380 billion valuation in Feb. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, was recognized at $852 billion (about 1,264 trillion won) in Mar., which Anthropic now exceeds.
The round was led by major venture capital (VC) firms including Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks Capital, and Sequoia Capital. Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that key investors each committed more than $2 billion.
Major semiconductor companies such as Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and Micron also joined the round. Existing strategic investors Google and Amazon injected additional large sums. Google invested several billion dollars, and Amazon invested $5 billion. Anthropic said, "The pre-committed investments from existing hyperscalers, including Amazon, total $15 billion."
Anthropic is an AI company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, and is growing rapidly around the AI model "Claude," the coding tool "Claude Code," and "Mythos," which excels at detecting security vulnerabilities.
As of early this month, Anthropic's annualized revenue surpassed $47 billion (about 70.4 trillion won). Bloomberg said second-quarter revenue is expected to reach $10.9 billion, and the company is projected to post a quarterly profit for the first time since its founding. The increase is driven by demand from corporate customers using "Claude Code." The company reportedly told investors that annualized revenue will exceed $50 billion by the end of next month.
Brad Gerstner, Altimeter Capital's chief executive officer (CEO), said, "The world's most demanding organizations are adopting Claude at scale," and added, "This momentum shows that Anthropic is positioned to lead next-generation AI innovation and capture a massive market opportunity."
Anthropic said it will use the newly secured funds to strengthen safety and interpretability research and to expand the computing infrastructure needed to meet rising demand for Claude. Krishna Rao, Anthropic's chief financial officer (CFO), said, "This capital raise will help us meet surging demand, stay at the forefront of research, and bring Claude to more work environments."
Anthropic also announced it will publicly release the cutting-edge AI model "Mythos," whose general release had been delayed, within a few weeks. Until now, Anthropic had restricted access to select corporations, citing concerns that Mythos could be misused for hacking and other malicious purposes.