Anthropic is close to raising $300 million as investors pour billions into AI startups and ChatGPT rivals
Daniel Levi
Posted On January 31, 2023
Since the launch of ChatGPT in November of last year, artificial intelligence (AI) startups have seen a has seen a resurgence in funding as investors and VC firms pour billion into the AI space hoping to find the next OpenAI. One of the startups is Anthropic, a generative artificial intelligence company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
According to a report from the New York Times, Anthropic is said to be close to raising an additional $300 million in funding at around a $5 billion valuation. As demand for ChatGPT surged in the last two months, Anthropic wants to keep its power dry while investors’ appetite for investment in AI is at its peak. Anthropic was previously backed by disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
In May 2021, the startup raised $124 million in funding from high-profile investors led by Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, with participation from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, James McClave, Dustin Moskovitz, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research, among others.
Based in Silicon Valley, Anthropic was founded by OpenAI’s former VP of research Dario Amodei. Sensing that generative artificial intelligence is going to have a major impact on the world, Dario struck out with his sister Daniela to create “large-scale AI systems that are steerable, interpretable, and robust.”
In a post on Twitter back then, Daniela said:
“Excited to announce what we’ve been working on this year – @AnthropicAI, an AI safety and research company. If you’d like to help us combine safety research with scaling ML models while thinking about societal impacts, check out our careers page anthropic.com/#careers”
Excited to announce what we’ve been working on this year – @AnthropicAI, an AI safety and research company. If you’d like to help us combine safety research with scaling ML models while thinking about societal impacts, check out our careers page https://t.co/TVHA0t7VLc
— Daniela Amodei (@DanielaAmodei) May 28, 2021
Anthropic is not the only startup riding the success of OpenAI’s success. Other generative AI startups were also cashing in on the hype before the party last. For example, in November of last year, AI content creation platform Jasper also raised $125 million, bringing its valuation to $1.5 billion. Stability AI is another one. The creators of AI-generated image software Stable Diffusion also raised $101 million in October while AI-powered language translator DeepL raised $100 million a few days before the OpenAI announced its billion-dollar deal.
Founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei (CEO), Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, and Tom Brown, Anthropic is working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. For now, the startup is primarily focusing on research towards these goals; down the road, we foresee many opportunities for our work to create value commercially and for public benefit, the company said on its website. To date, Anthropic has raised a total of $704 million in funding over 2 rounds. Its latest funding was raised on Apr 29, 2022, from a Series B round.
