Anthropic and OpenAI have begun competing to secure consulting staff who support on-site adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) by corporations.
Odd with Anthropic, a joint venture formed by Anthropic and Wall Street financial firms, said on the 20th (local time) it will acquire Casper Studio, an AI consulting firm that employs on-site consultants known as "forward deployed engineers." These engineers are dispatched to client companies to organize files and internal data so AI can understand them, and they also support app development such as customer support automation.
Casper, now in its fourth year, has about 10 technical consultants and has a track record of working with Netflix and Pepsi.
The acquisition price was not disclosed.
Odd with Anthropic and Casper cited their collaboration with a shared client, a safety management platform company, as the rationale for the acquisition. Odd with Anthropic developed custom internal tools used in the corporation's core operations that cut bottleneck tasks by 70%, and Casper supported automation across customer support, consulting, and project management.
Chris Taylor, Odd's chief executive officer (CEO), said, "If you use the various tools Anthropic is building on top of its own model, you can actually get a lot of what you need done."
In July, Anthropic launched Odd with Anthropic by acquiring applied AI services firm FractionalAI for $1.5 billion (about 2.1 trillion won) together with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Sequoia Capital.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is pursuing a similar strategy. Its own joint venture that sells AI to corporations, "Deployment Company," raised $4 billion (about 5.6 trillion won) at a $10 billion (about 14 trillion won) valuation from Brookfield asset management and Bain Capital, and used the funds to buy firms that employ hundreds of AI integration consultants.
Thrive Holdings, the holding company of OpenAI investor Thrive Capital, also recently raised $2 billion (about 2.8 trillion won) to acquire equity stakes in small accounting and services firms and directly operate them, automating repetitive tasks.
OpenAI is supporting Thrive Holdings with research and product staff, while not restricting subsidiaries from using other AI models.