According to reports, Anthropic is about to complete a $3.5B funding round. The Amazon-backed AI startup and maker of the Claude chatbot could potentially bring in 75% more funds than the $2B it planned to raise initially.
Anthropic is a major fixture in the AI industry, and it is one of the few AI startups with the capacity and financial resources to seriously contend with OpenAI. The AI startup was founded by siblings and former OpenAI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei in 2021.
The startup achieved an $18 billion valuation after a fundraiser led by Menlo Ventures last year. It is now looking at a valuation of $61.5B with this latest funding round.
Anthropic’s $3.5B funding round
Anthropic’s current $3.5B funding round, which is about to be finalized, has been in progress since at least January 2025. In early January, reports had earlier emerged that the company was in advanced talks to raise $2 billion at a valuation of $60 billion.
These advanced talks were with Lightspeed Venture Partners. Usually, funding rounds are a lot like fishing. Companies in need of funding cast a wide net, pitching themselves to a variety of potential investors, showing them what they’ve built and their potential for growth, hoping to reel in the right backers. However, in the case of Anthropic, Lightspeed Venture Partners approached it just before Christmas in 2024—no net needed.
Lightspeed is part of an exclusive class of VC firms capable of supporting the most promising tech companies irrespective of the cost. In addition to Anthropic, Lightspeed participated in a large funding round for AI company Databricks Inc. that valued it at $62B, as well as an investment in Elon Musk’s xAI when it was still valued at $50B.
Lightspeed Venture Partners’ interest in investing is what propelled Anthropic to start its $2B funding round in early 2025. However, due to overwhelming investor interest, the AI firm expanded its fundraising target to $3.5B, leading to a valuation of $61.5B.
This overwhelming interest in Anthropic from investors comes amid rising competition from China’s free DeepSeek AI, which rivals the most notable APIs in the US after it was produced at a fraction of the cost and with much less time.
In February 2025, the AI startup signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT).
Anthropic’s annualized revenue is up to approximately $1.2B, while OpenAI, the AI market leader, was expected to generate $3.7B in revenue last year.
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, is also in talks with potential investors for a roughly $10B funding round that would value the company at about $75B.
Anthropic has the interest of prominent backers
Anthropic’s upcoming $3.5B funding round required a minimum investment of about $100M, so it’s no surprise that the company attracted a consortium of prominent investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX. Lightspeed Venture Partners is expected to lead the $3.5B financing round with a $1B commitment.
Amazon is Anthropic’s major backer with investments of up to $14 billion as of December 2024. As part of their partnership, Amazon also integrates its AI models into Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Anthropic has also secured investments from Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company. Anthropic’s recently launched AI model Claude 3.7 Sonnet can be accessed on Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.
The Claude 3.7 Sonnet pitch features “hybrid reasoning” capabilities which helps it to solve complex problem-solving tasks, such as mathematics and coding.
Anthropic has also launched Claude Code as a tool to simplify code collaboration, enabling tasks such as reading, editing, testing, and interacting with command-line tools.
The AI firm is expected to use the funds from the $3.5B funding round to continue innovating and creating more powerful AI models.
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