Anthropic raises $65 billion, approaching $1 trillion valuation ahead of IPO

Anthropic has secured $65 billion in funding at a post-cash valuation of $965 billion in its latest funding round, marking what could be the AI ​​startup’s last private fundraising before its public market debut.

The Series H round was jointly led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners and others. Institutional investors, including Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, DE 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. Part of the round — $15 billion — also consists of previously committed investments from hyper-agile companies, 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 at the cap table. One institutional investor even pledged as much as $5 billion just for a meeting with Anthropic’s CFO, Krishna Rao.

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

The round comes on the same day Anthropic launched its new Claude Opus 4.8 model, which touts better capabilities in proxy tasks, advanced programming, and a focus on honesty and self-correction. The AI ​​startup is also said to be planning to launch models on a larger scale on par with cybersecurity powerhouse Mythos, which it launched in only a limited way due to potential safety concerns.

The company has seen increased growth since its latest funding round, especially among enterprise customers who rely on Claude Code. The company said its run-rate revenue surpassed $47 billion earlier this month, and the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the startup expects a 130% revenue increase to reach its first operating profit.

“Claude’s latest advances have led to widespread adoption among the world’s most demanding organizations. This momentum positions Anthropic to lead the next phase of AI innovation and seize the tremendous opportunity ahead,” said Brad Gerstner, Founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital.

Anthropic has been in intense competition with OpenAI for fundraising and user growth ahead of their respective IPOs. Earlier this year, OpenAI raised its last massive $122 billion round in March at a post-cash valuation of $852 billion.

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