Anthropic closes in on $20B round

Anthropic is in the final stages of raising $20 billion in new capital at a valuation of $350 billion, Bloomberg reports, with investor demand leading the company to raise twice the funding it set out to obtain. The company raised $13 billion in equity funding just five months ago, but intense competition between frontier labs and the ongoing cost of compute has made it eager to raise as quickly as possible.

Firms 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 recent successes, most notably the deployment of its coding agents, which have software engineers raving about increased coding productivity. Last week, the company’s release of new models focused on legal and business research rattled the share prices of publicly traded data firms as investors worried about the ability of AI to disrupt their businesses.

Anthropic’s rival, OpenAI, is reportedly assembling a new $100 billion fundraising round, and both companies are thought to be preparing IPOs ahead of a blockbuster summer in the markets, with xAI, recently acquired by SpaceX, also tapping public equity as part of the rocket maker’s IPO.