In one of those tech biz stories where the source is “people familiar with the matter,” Bloomberg is claiming that Anthropic is preparing for a funding round that will value the company at “more than $900.” Anthropic’s chief competitor, OpenAI, closed a funding round about a month ago valuing it at $852 billion.
So there would be a new AI valuation champ in town, and there are good reasons to think this round really could be coming. Anthropic shares on some secondary markets are already traded at prices that would place Anthropic’s total value at around $1 trillion.
Anthropic is a private company, but publicly traded stock will become a reality later this year if its rumored IPO goes forward.
The company’s most recent funding round was in February, placing its value at $380 billion at the time, a dizzyingly sharp rise in less than three months.
Earlier this month, it was reported that Anthropic had turned down a funding round that would have valued it at about $800 billion. Around that same time, the Financial Times ran a story claiming that OpenAI backers seemed to be getting buyer’s remorse as Anthropic began pulling in billions of dollars in revenue from enterprise customers over the past several months.
Anthropic investors, it should be noted, have to look past a rather ominous asterisk when they contemplate the company’s financials: It was labeled a supply chain risk by the Pentagon, a designation that came with an order demanding that all Pentagon contractors not do business with it. Anthropic’s litigation over the designation is still pending, and in the meantime, Anthropic’s future is ostensibly in serious jeopardy. But apparently over on Sand Hill Road, the Pentagon’s bluster doesn’t even register.
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