Anthropic, OpenAI biggest competitors set to raise $750 million in new round of funding

According to new reports, AI startup Anthropic is set to raise $750 million in a new round of funding led by Menlo Ventures. The funding would put Anthropic’s market value at $18.4 billion representing almost a 5 times increase in less than a year. The AI company is yet to comment on the story.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by two ex-OpenAI employees, Daniela and Dario Amodei, and is the company behind Claude 2 a chatbot like ChatGPT that is currently being used by multiple companies including Slack, Notion, and Quora.

Claude 2 can create summaries of up to 75,000 words which is impressive compared to ChatGPT’s limit of about 3,000 words.

Anthropic has secured two rounds of funding so far totaling $750 million from multiple companies including Salesforce Zoom, and Google which now owns a 10% stake in the AI startup.

Google gave Anthropic $500 million upfront with a promise to invest $1.5 billion more over time.

According to PitchBook data, Anthropic’s second round of funding in May was the largest ever at the time for an AI company after Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI in January.

CEO, Daniela Amodei, is optimistic about the future and only sees growth potential. “It’s a really unusual time from a business perspective because there’s just so much demand for large language models and really more demand than the industry can currently provide,” She said. “The landscape is just very wide, and there’s really quite a lot of room for many different users and types of users to make use of these systems.“

Earlier this year, Daniela revealed that Anthropic invested at least two months in developing its newest chatbot, with a team of 30 to 35 people working directly on the AI model and a total of 150 people supporting it.

A machine learning monitoring platform conducted a study of chatbots from top companies including Meta, Cohere, and OpenAI, and it labeled Anthropic’s Claude 2 as the most self-aware. That’s to mean it was the most successful in gauging what it does and doesn’t know.