Anthropy is close to a $20 billion round

Anthropic is in the final stages of raising $20 billion in new capital at a $350 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported, with investor demand leading the company to raise twice the funding it had planned to get. The company raised $13 billion in equity funding just five months ago, but intense competition among frontier labs and the ongoing cost of computing made them eager to raise money as quickly as possible.

Funds expected to participate in the round include Altimeter Capital Management, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Coatue Management, Iconiq Capital, and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, but the bulk of the funding is said to come from the company’s strategic partners Nvidia and Microsoft.

Anthropic is building on its recent successes, most notably the deployment of its programming agents, which has software engineers excited about increasing programming productivity. Last week, the company’s release of new models focused on legal and business research rattled the stock prices of publicly traded data companies, as investors worried about the potential for artificial intelligence to disrupt their businesses.

Anthropic’s competitor, OpenAI, is said to be raising a new $100 billion fundraising round, and both companies are thought to be gearing up for an IPO before the market’s massive summer, with xAI, recently acquired by SpaceX, also tapping into public stock as part of the rocket maker’s IPO.