Anthropic raised $750 million this month according to the New York Times. The fundraising was carried out by the American venture capital company Menlo Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to…$7.3 billion over the past year.
Anthropic was co-founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees. And the company enjoys a strong partnership with Google. After initially raising $450 million from Google and Salesforce among others, investments poured in from around the world, with for example the Korean LG which took a notable stake in the company.
In August last year, Anthropic also raised $100 million from two Asian telecommunications companies. Amazon and Google invested $4 billion and $2 billion, respectively.
Hardware and cloud services as fundraising
Anthropic uses chips and cloud computing services from the companies that have invested in Anthropic. Enough to return part of the money raised to investors (Microsoft does the same with its cloud credits for OpenAI).
Claude, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, has thus established itself as a serious competitor to ChatGPT. It is one of the most popular AI services available on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Anthropic has seen its valuation triple to $15 billion over the past year. Its average monthly turnover was approximately… $8 million. Analysts expect this turnover to increase eightfold this year.
Conquering the infrastructure to make AI
Its rival OpenAI was recently valued at over $80 billion in valuation. It received $1 billion in funding from Microsoft in 2019 and another $12 billion since. OpenAI dedicates most of this funding to Microsoft Azure cloud services.
And at the same time, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that he wanted to raise up to $9,000 billion to directly manufacture AI semiconductors.
This initiative comes as American competition authorities are investigating large-scale investments in AI startups. The investments of Amazon and Google in Anthropic are, for example, scrutinized by the regulator.
Other countries are also taking action. European Union authorities are investigating whether Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI amounted to a de facto merger and could reduce competition in the market. The British competition authority is also investigating whether this transaction could breach competition law.
Source: “ZDNet Korea”