Recently, news broke that artificial intelligence startupAnthropicis in preliminary talks with investors and plans to raise a new round of funding that could value it at as much as $40 billion.
The news comes from The Information, and according to an existing investor who wished to remain anonymous, the company is in discussions with investors. However, those talks are still in the early stages, and it's unclear whether investors would agree to such a high valuation.
Anthropic plans to present to investors at the Morgan Stanley Private Tech Conference next month. Typically, startups are less likely to bring in investment banks to driveFinancing, but Anthropic took this strategy during the complex financing process. It's worth noting that Anthropic had previously relied primarily on corporate investors for financing, rather than relying solely on venture capital firms.
This news of Anthropic seeking funding comes just a short time after competitor OpenAI also announced plans to raise $6.5 billion at a $150 billion valuation.
So far.Anthropic has raised approximately $7.6 billion, including pre-commitments.The largest investor is Amazon, which has already invested $2.75 billion and $1.25 billion in Anthropic this year, respectively.
Amazon will likely be an investor again in the new funding round, which is inextricably linked to the deepening partnership between the two. Currently, Microsoft and Apple have invested and partnered with OpenAI, while Google is developing its own AI models and Amazon has chosen to partner with Anthropic.
Anthropic's partnership is also reflected in the availability of its large-scale language model on Amazon's Bedrock platform. It was also previously reported that Anthropic will be powering a new version of Amazon's Alexa smart assistant.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives. The company focuses on creating explainable, safe, and bootstrapped AI systems that prioritize following ethical guidelines to reduce harmful or unpredictable outputs.