AI Startup Anthropic Brings In $450 Million Making It The 2nd Richest AI Startup

Anthropic, a generative AI startup founded by former OpenAI veterans, has raised $450 million in a Series C funding round.

Led by Spark Capital, the funding round saw participation from some prominent tech companies, including Google, Salesforce, and Zoom, as well as some major VC firms like Sound Ventures and Menlo Ventures.

“We are thrilled that these leading investors and technology companies are supporting Anthropic’s mission: AI research and products that put safety at the frontier,” CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement. He added:

“The systems we are building are being designed to provide reliable AI services that can positively impact businesses and consumers now and in the future.”

The company detailed that it would use the new funding to further improve its AI assistant Claude and expand its list of product offerings.

Some notable rivals of Anthropic include OpenAI, Cohere, AI21 Labs, and Adept, all of which are developing and commercializing their own text-generating and image-generating AI systems.

Anthropic Becomes Second Richest AI Startup

With the new funding round, Anthropic has accumulated a whopping $1.45 billion to date.

This makes the company the second richest AI startup behind OpenAI, which has raised over $11.3 billion to date, according to Crunchbase.

Inflection AI, another competitor building an AI-powered personal assistant, has secured $225 million, while Adept has raised around $415 million.

current ranking of the best LLMs out there

let's see what that $450m anthropic raise can do pic.twitter.com/duDGl8F2Qi

— Avi (@AviSchiffmann) May 24, 2023

Amodei, the former VP of research at OpenAI, launched Anthropic as a public benefit corporation in 2021 (though it’s still a for-profit company).

The company reportedly has over a dozen customers across industries such as healthcare, HR, and education.

Just recently, Zoom announced a partnership with Anthropic to bring the Claude chatbot to its products. Similarly, Google has purchased a 10% stake in the AI startup and inked a large cloud contract with the company.

Anthropic’s ambitions go beyond just text-generating AI systems. It plans to create a “next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching” that could be used to build virtual assistants that can answer emails, perform research and generate art, books, and more.

Anthropic Continues to Improve its AI Chatbot

Anthropic has recently expanded its context window, which is essentially Claude’s memory, from 9,000 tokens to 100,000 tokens, which gives it an edge over other public AI models.

In fact, Claude now has the largest context window compared to other public AI models, which enables it to hold relatively coherent conversations that can last for hours or even days. Additionally, it can quickly analyze and digest hundreds of pages of documents.

However, this does not come at a cheap cost. The company has projected that it would need about a billion dollars in spending over the next 18 months.

Anthropic aims to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years to spearhead its AI alignment techniques, allowing AI systems to better handle adversarial conversations, follow precise instructions, and be more transparent about their behaviors and limitations.

“With our Series C funding, we hope to grow our product offerings, support business that will responsibly deploy Claude in the market, and further AI safety research,” the company wrote in the recent announcement.

It also stressed that the “team is focused on AI alignment techniques that allow AI systems to better handle adversarial conversations, follow precise instructions and generally be more transparent about their behaviors and limitations.”

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