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The announcement comes a week after the launch of its latest GenAI model, the Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
Anthropic has raised $3.5bn in a Series E funding round, taking the four-year-old start-up to a $61.5bn post-raise valuation. The round, announced yesterday (3 March), was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and saw participation from several big name investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, Fidelity Management and Research Company and General Catalyst.
According to Anthropic, the new infusion will advance the development of its next-generation AI systems, accelerate its international expansion, and expand its compute and research capacity.
Just last week, Anthropic announced the launch of its latest generative AI (GenAI) model, the Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which can extend its thinking, allowing users to direct the model to spend more time on a prompt before responding. The newest model showcases “improved capability” over its predecessor, the Claude 3.5 Sonnet, allocating more turns, time and computational power to complete tasks.
“Claude 3.7 Sonnet has set a new high-water mark in coding abilities – an area where Anthropic plans to make further progress in the coming months,” wrote the start-up.
Anthropic’s Claude has been integrated across industries, the start-up said, from video conferencing tools such as Zoom to pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Moreover, Thompson Reuters’ tax platform CoCounsel uses Claude to assist tax professionals, while the Danish Ozempic-maker Novo Nordisk reportedly uses the GenAI tool to draft clinical reports in minutes, a task which previously took the company 12 weeks.
The announcement comes after more than a month of speculation that Anthropic would be heading towards a fresh funding round. While recently, Google reportedly pumped more than $1bn into the start-up, taking its total investments into the start-up to more than $3bn in two years.
While Amazon has pumped $8bn into Anthropic over the years, starting with a $1.25bn initial investment in 2023, giving the e-commerce giant a minority stake in the business, followed by $2.75bn in March 2024, and an additional $4bn last November.
Meanwhile, Anthropic’s chief competitor OpenAI was recently valued at up to $340bn, which would more than double its previous valuation just five months ago. This, while PitchBook data shows that more than a third of all venture capital funding in 2024 went into AI and machine learning start-ups.
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