Anthropic Nears $1 Trillion Valuation, Overtakes OpenAI Ahead of IPO

American AI startup Anthropic has reached close to a trillion-dollar valuation, surpassing its rival OpenAI even as both prepare for their stock market debut.

In a latest funding round, the Claude maker raised $65 billion, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $965 billion post-money.

Claude's adoption has continued to grow across global enterprises customers and the AI giant's run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month, the company said.

"Claude is increasingly indispensable to our growing global community of customers, and we work tirelessly to make tools like Claude Code and Cowork more helpful, more powerful, and more adaptable to their needs," said Krishna Rao, Chief Financial Officer of Anthropic.

How Will Anthropic Use This Funding to Expand Claude and Meet Surging Demand?

The latest funding round will help the company in advancing its safety and interpretability research, expand compute to meet growing demand for Claude, and scale the products and partnerships customers rely on, the company said in a blogpost.

Significant investors in this round include AMP PBC, Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, D.E. Shaw Ventures among others. Joining the slate of marquee investors are infrastructure partners Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix.

The AI player estimates a revenue of $10.9 billion, more than double the previous one. The company is expected to report its first operating profit in the June quarter.

Anthropic is rapidly ramping up its compute capacity as it expands its operations and with demand for Claude gaining momentum.

"We signed agreements with Amazon for up to five gigawatts of new capacity, with Google and Broadcom for five gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity, and with SpaceX for access to GPU capacity in Colossus 1 and Colossus 2," the company's blogpost said.

Claude is available on all three of the world's largest cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

"Startups and Global 5000 companies alike are deploying Claude to handle complex workflows, and in doing so, Claude is learning how businesses actually operate: the context, the processes, the judgment," said Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia Capital.

OpenAI had raised a massive $122 billion in March valuing the company at $852 billion.

(With inputs from ANI)