Anthropic on Tuesday announced it has closed a massive $13 billion funding round at a $183 billion post-money valuation — roughly triple what the artificial intelligence startup was worth as of its last raise in March.
The round was led by Iconiq, Fidelity Management & Research Co., and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with other participants including Altimeter, General Catalyst, and Coatue, Anthropic said.
“This financing demonstrates investors’ extraordinary confidence in our financial performance and the strength of their collaboration with us to continue fueling our unprecedented growth,” Anthropic finance chief Krishna Rao said in a statement.
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The company’s valuation has been on a steep climb since it launched its AI assistant Claude in March 2023. The Amazon-backed startup was founded by former OpenAI research executives, including its CEO Dario Amodei, who positioned Anthropic as a safety-first alternative in the rapidly evolving AI race.
Anthropic’s rise has placed it in direct competition with OpenAI, which rocketed into the mainstream following the release of ChatGPT in 2022. OpenAI is also preparing to sell stock as part of a secondary sale that would value the company at roughly $500 billion, as CNBC reported in August.
The rivalry reflects broader dynamics in the AI sector, where investors are pouring billions into leading firms amid surging global demand for advanced large language models. Tech giants have taken sides, with Amazon and Google both investing in Anthropic, while Microsoft remains OpenAI’s largest backer.
Anthropic said its run-rate revenue has soared to more than $5 billion as of August, up sharply from roughly $1 billion at the beginning of the year, driven by the adoption of Claude by large enterprises. The company now serves more than 300,000 business customers worldwide.
The fresh capital will be deployed to deepen Anthropic’s research into AI safety, meet growing enterprise demand, and support international expansion, underscoring its ambition to challenge OpenAI’s dominance in the generative AI space.
The record funding also highlights a broader investor bet on the future of AI. Despite billions of dollars already funneled into the industry — with Microsoft’s $13 billion investment in OpenAI standing out as the most notable example — AI startups are still largely unproven in delivering long-term financial returns.
By March 2025, OpenAI closed a record-setting $40 billion funding round at a $300 billion valuation — the largest capital raise ever by a private technology company. Earlier last month, it followed up with another $8.3 billion injection tied to that same round. In August, Bloomberg reported that the company has $6 billion secondary offering under discussion, with its valuation expected to climb to around $500 billion.
This shows that investors continue to double down, signaling faith that the sector will eventually reshape entire industries and yield enormous profits. But for now, revenues are climbing quickly, while the massive scale of investment has outpaced realized profits. Yet the ongoing willingness of investors to pour more capital into firms like Anthropic suggests they view AI not as a passing hype cycle, but as the foundation of the next great technological revolution.