Anthropic raises $65 Billion, nears $1T valuation ahead of IPO

Anthropic has snagged anthropic.com/news/series-h">$65 billion in funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation in its latest funding round, marking what could be the AI startup’s last private fundraising before debuting on the public markets.

The Series H round was co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners and others. Institutional investors including Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, D.E. Shaw Ventures, DST Global, and Fidelity Management & Research participated in the round. 

Strategic infrastructure partners, including Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, also joined the round. A portion of the round — $15 billion — is also made up of previously committed investments from hyperscalers, including $5 billion from Amazon announced in April. 

TechCrunch reported last month that Anthropic was close to closing a $50 billion round, with investors clamoring to get on the cap table. One institutional investor had even pledged as much as $5 billion just to get a meeting with Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao.

Anthropic plans to use the new funds to “advance our safety and interpretability research, expand compute to meet growing demand for Claude, and scale the products and partnerships our customers rely on.” 

The round comes the same day that Anthropic released its new Claude Opus 4.8 model, which touts better capabilities in agentic tasks, advanced coding, and focus on honesty and self-correction. The AI startup is also reportedly planning to more widely launch models that are on par with its powerful cybersecurity model Mythos, which it has only released in limited fashion due to potential safety concerns. 

The company has seen increased growth since its last funding round, particularly among enterprise customers that rely on Claude Code. The company said its run rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month, and The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the startup expects a 130% revenue surge to bring it to its first operating profit.  

“Claude’s latest advancements have driven large-scale adoption among the world’s most demanding organizations. This momentum positions Anthropic to lead the next phase of AI innovation and capture the enormous opportunity ahead,” said Brad Gerstner, Founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital.

Anthropic has been in tight competition with OpenAI for fundraising and user growth in advance of their respective IPOs. Earlier this year, OpenAI last raised a whopping $122 billion round in March at an $852 billion post-money valuation.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX — which merged with xAI earlier this year — is targeting a $2 trillion valuation in its pending IPO, and seeking to raise more than $75 billion.