Anthropic closes $3.5B Series E, valuation soars to $61.5B

Leader in Artificial Intelligence Anthropic Recently announced the completion of the E round of financing, the amount of financing up to 3.5 billion U.S. dollars, the company's post-investment valuation also jumped to 61.5 billion U.S. dollars. Against the backdrop of the current complex and volatile global economic situation, such a large amount of financing has undoubtedly injected a shot in the arm for the AI industry, and once again confirmed the capital market's long-term optimism for AI technology, especially for Anthropic and other star companies. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and followed by a number of well-known investment institutions, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst and Anthropic. Research Company, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.

Strategic Considerations Behind Huge Financing: Building an AI Ecological Moat

Anthropic said that this round of financing will be mainly used to accelerate the research and development of next-generation AI systems, which signals that the AI technology race has entered a deep-water zone, where arithmetic, algorithms and data will become the core competitiveness. The company will also significantly expand its computing power, which is crucial for training more powerful AI models, and will also conduct more in-depth research on the interpretability and alignment of modeling mechanisms, which reflects Anthropic's pursuit of technological leadership, but also attaches great importance to the safety and reliability of AI technology, and strives to build a responsible AI ecosystem. In addition, Anthropic's aggressive pace of global market expansion demonstrates Anthropic's ambition to capture the global AI market.

It's worth noting that shortly before this funding announcement, Anthropic just launched the Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code Two heavyweight new products, new product release and financing news come one after another, this is not a coincidence, but an important signal that Anthropic is ready to launch and accelerate the commercialization of landing. Claude 3.7 Sonnet has set a new benchmark in terms of code capability, which indicates that the potential of AI in software development is accelerating, and is expected to disrupt the traditional software development model in the future. Anthropic plans to continue to make breakthroughs in this area in the coming months. Based on the accumulation of these technologies, Anthropic is working to develop AI systems that can truly become "collaborators" with humans. This strategic direction is extremely forward-looking, and indicates that future AI applications will not only be tools, but also intelligent partners that can collaborate and innovate with humans to solve complex problems. It is expected that these systems can work side by side with teams in various fields to tackle complex project challenges, synthesize information across fields, and ultimately help enterprises and organizations realize greater value.

Claude lands in multiple industries, with a bright future for commercialization

Currently, enterprises from all industries have begun to adopt Claude to revolutionize their business operations, including fast-growing startups such as Cursor and Codeium, as well as global enterprises such as Zoom, Snowflake and Pfizer. This fully demonstrates that the application of generative AI technology represented by Claude has moved from proof-of-concept to scale and commercial value is being released at an accelerated pace. For example, Replit integrated Claude into its "Agent" product, realizing the function of transforming natural language into code. This innovative application mode has significantly reduced the programming threshold, revolutionized the popularization and efficiency of software development, and directly pushed the company's revenue up 10 times. Thomson Reuters' tax platform, CoCounsel, utilizes Claude to provide intelligent assistance to tax professionals, demonstrating the potential for AI to be used in professional services to improve productivity and decision-making. Pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk has used Claude to dramatically reduce the time it takes to write a clinical study from 12 weeks to 10 minutes. This will undoubtedly greatly accelerate the process of new drug development and bring disruptive innovation to the pharmaceutical industry. In addition, Amazon's Alexa+ is also powered by Claude, bringing advanced AI functionality to millions of households and Prime members, and the introduction of AI assistants to millions of households signals the accelerating integration of AI technology into people's daily lives, making it a smart service at their fingertips.

Anthropic emphasizes that as it continues to grow, the company will always focus on deepening its understanding of cutting-edge AI systems and is committed to ensuring that AI technology can effectively contribute to the progress of human society. This statement reflects the sense of social responsibility and humanistic care that technology companies should have, and is also in line with the current trend of the global technology development, that is, science and technology innovation should be human-centered and serve the well-being of human beings.

With a valuation approaching $100 billion, Anthropic is poised to reshape the AI competitive landscape

Anthropic's $3.5 billion round of Series E financing not only set a new record for financing in the AI field, but more importantly, its $61.5 billion post-investment valuation is comparable to or even exceeds that of some traditional tech giants, which fully reflects the capital market's extremely optimistic about Anthropic's future development potential. Looking back on the course of this round of financing, Anthropic's initial target was $2 billion, but due to the enthusiasm of investors to subscribe, the final oversubscription to $3.5 billion, the emergence of oversubscription phenomenon once again proves the scarcity and investment value of high-quality AI assets, but also reflects the market's pursuit of the head of the AI enterprises continues to heat up.

It's worth noting that while OpenAI's ChatGPT Anthropic's traffic far exceeds Anthropic's Claude, but traffic does not fully represent commercial value, Anthropic focuses on enterprise-level applications and safe and reliable AI development route, perhaps more in line with the long-term trend of future AI development. In terms of financing scale, Anthropic is rapidly approaching OpenAI, and data shows that during the relevant time period, OpenAI's financing amount was only 31% higher than Anthropic's. The competition pattern of the two star AI companies also signals that the innovation and competition in the field of AI will be more diversified, and OpenAI will no longer be the only one. In addition, a report pointed out that about 36% occupations have applied AI to at least a quarter of their tasks, and 4% occupations even rely on AI for three-quarters of their tasks, which indicates that the penetration rate of AI technology is accelerating, and the demand for AI in various industries is exploding, which also brings unprecedented market opportunities for AI companies such as Anthropic. AI companies such as Anthropic have unprecedented market opportunities.

Looking ahead, Anthropic's successful financing and technological breakthroughs signal the arrival of a new phase in the development of AI technology. As AI companies represented by Anthropic continue to innovate, AI technology will play a key role in a wider range of fields, profoundly changing the global industrial landscape and human lifestyle. Anthropic, a rising AI star, may reshape the global AI competition pattern by virtue of its unique strategic and technological advantages, and lead AI technology to a safer, more reliable and more inclusive future.