Amazon-backed AI startup Anthropic hits $61.5B valuation after $3.5B funding round

Anthropic just closed its latest funding round, securing $3.5 billion and pushing its post-money valuation to $61.5 billion, the company confirmed to CNBC. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Investments, Fidelity Management & Research Co., General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners, and Jane Street, among others.

The funding news comes just over a week after The Wall Street Journal reported that the four-year-old AI startup was closing in on a $3.5 billion round, pushing its valuation to $61.5 billion. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, continues to attract major investors betting on the future of artificial intelligence.

The artificial intelligence startup, backed heavily by Amazon, was founded by former OpenAI executives. Since launching Claude in March 2023, the company has gained traction alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini as businesses look for AI-driven solutions across sales, marketing, and customer service.

With this fresh capital, Anthropic plans to scale its AI efforts. The company outlined its focus on expanding compute capacity, advancing AI interpretability and alignment research, and accelerating international growth in Asia and Europe.

“With this investment, Anthropic will advance its development of next-generation AI systems, expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion,” Anthropic said in a news release.

A Billion-Dollar Revenue Milestone

In December, Anthropic’s revenue hit an annualized $1 billion, a tenfold increase year-over-year, according to a source who spoke to CNBC on the condition of anonymity. Most of its revenue comes from enterprise sales, with customers ranging from startups like Cursor, Codeium, and Replit to larger corporations such as Zoom, Snowflake, Pfizer, Thomson Reuters, and Novo Nordisk (the company behind Ozempic).

Anthropic highlighted in its funding announcement that its technology now powers Amazon’s Alexa+, bringing Claude to millions of households and Prime members.

Big Tech’s AI Arms Race

Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s CFO, framed the funding as a push toward building more intelligent AI systems that expand what’s possible for businesses and individuals. “Continued advances in scaling across all aspects of model training are powering breakthroughs in intelligence and expertise,” he said.

Anthropic’s latest raise comes on the heels of Google’s additional $1 billion investment in January. Google previously poured $2 billion into the startup, securing a 10% ownership stake and locking in a large cloud contract between the two companies.

Amazon has also doubled down on its bet, announcing a $4 billion investment in Anthropic in November, bringing its total funding commitment to $8 billion. Despite this, Amazon remains a minority investor with no board seat. As part of the deal, Amazon Web Services (AWS) became Anthropic’s primary cloud and training partner, with the startup using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its most advanced AI models.

Advancing AI Beyond Chatbots

Anthropic has been ramping up its AI research. Last October, the company showcased its AI agents’ ability to operate computers autonomously, completing tasks such as selecting buttons, entering text, browsing websites, and interacting with software—an approach that moves AI beyond simple text-based interactions.

With a $1 trillion AI market projected within the next decade, tech giants, including Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google, are racing to dominate the space. While OpenAI remains the leader in enterprise AI adoption, Anthropic is making a strong case for itself as a key player.

For now, with fresh capital in hand, the company is pushing forward with bigger AI ambitions, stronger infrastructure, and a growing global footprint.

Anthropic’s Meteoric Rise

Based in San Francisco, Anthropic has gained recognition for its advancements in generative AI, emerging as a strong competitor to industry leaders like OpenAI. Its flagship chatbot, Claude, has been gaining momentum, demonstrating impressive capabilities across various use cases.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives Dario Amodei (CEO), Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, and Tom Brown. Driven by the transformative potential of generative AI, Dario, and Daniela Amodei set out to create “large-scale AI systems that are steerable, interpretable, and robust.” Before launching Anthropic, Daniela Amodei served as OpenAI’s safety and policy vice president