Artificial intelligence has brought great advances to the tech industry and the consumer market. However, there is one hard fact: it is quite expensive to develop. AI companies must spend hundreds of millions on developing and training AI models—billions over the long term—to stay on top. This makes funding rounds especially key. Anthropic, one of the leading names in the segment, has just raised $3.5 billion to continue its AI development.
Anthropic recently conducted the Series E funding round, where Lightspeed Venture Partners led. Other firms such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Jane Street, Salesforce Ventures, and Menlo Ventures also participated. After the funding round, the company reached a total valuation of $61.5 billion.
Anthropic AI raised $3.5 billion during the Series E funding round; $61.5 billion total valuation
“With this investment, Anthropic will advance its development of next-generation AI systems, expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion,” reads the company’s blog post.
Anthropic is the parent company of the Claude AI models. Other firms that have recently funded Anthropic include Google with $3 billion and Amazon with $8 billion. Deals with such cloud service providers also imply that Anthropic uses these platforms to develop and run its AI models. In this way, all the companies involved “feed back” on each other with both funding and technology.
Last month, Anthropic released Claude 3.7 Sonnet as a “hybrid reasoning” AI model. The company claims it’s especially good at coding-related tasks. Claude also has a mobile app that you can download. However, their business model revolves around offering platforms that third parties can build on. This is different from the models of OpenAI or Google, who primarily offer end products for the consumer market—although they also have APIs for developers.
Amazon recently announced Alexa+ as the improved version of its virtual assistant. The new conversational and context-aware capabilities are powered by Claude AI. As reported by TechCrunch, Reuters uses Claude in its CoCounsel tax platform. Novo Nordisk, a medical company, managed to reduce the time to create clinical reports from twelve weeks to just ten minutes thanks to Claude.
Claude 3.7 Sonnet bets on simplicity and accessibility
Still, Anthropic has also thought of the general public by developing Claude 3.7 Sonnet. The company is pioneering an approach that all AI companies could take going forward. Basically, all the capabilities of its models are available with a single option. Having a list of several models to choose from can potentially cause confusion. Claude will simply use the most suitable model according to your request.
Other companies have so far opted to launch AI models focused on different tasks and let the user choose. However, Anthropic’s approach is a big step toward accessibility.
