Is Anthropic on its way to becoming a $100 billion company?
According to a report Wednesday (July 16) by Bloomberg News, the artificial intelligence (AI) startup is planning a new investment round that could bring it to that valuation.
The report, citing sources familiar with the matter, said that Anthropic is not formally fundraising, though pre-emptive funding offers from venture capitalists to high profile AI startups have become standard in Silicon Valley. Investors have approached Anthropic signaling they would invest at a valuation north of $100 billion, the sources said.
Anthropic was valued at $61.5 billion earlier this year following a $3.5 billion funding round. PYMNTS has contacted the company for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.
The report notes that the investment discussions are taking place amid a surge in revenue from Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, with annualized revenue jumping from $3 billion to $4 billion in the past month.
Founded in 2021, Anthropic’s investors include both Google and Amazon, the latter of which is said to be weighing a new multibillion dollar injection into the company on top of the $8 billion it has already invested.
Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke earlier this week with Jonathan “JP” Pelosi, head of FSI at Anthropic, about the company’s new Claude for Financial Services offering, an AI solution designed for analysts, portfolio managers and underwriters at large financial institutions.
It’s the first industry-specific service that Anthropic has formally introduced, Pelosi said.
“Where we saw a lot of traction early on was with these high-trust industries,” he added. “Our models, our solutions, are just very well positioned to help these firms.”
Still, the AI industry has a lot to prove before chief financial officers grow comfortable with the technology, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Agentic Trust Gap: Enterprise CFOs Push Pause on Agentic AI.”
That report found concerns about the technology that include hallucinations, where an AI agent can go off script and expose companies to cascading payment errors and other inaccuracies.
For highly regulated industries such as financial services, the accurate responses of generative AI models are critical, and Pelosi said the new tool comes through on that front.
The worry over hallucinations has “significantly stymied meaningful adoption in the financial industry,” Pelosi said. “If you and I are in the business of making very large investments or analysis on very high-stakes transactions, we don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘Hopefully that [calculation is] right.’”
Still, Pelosi stopped short of saying Anthropic has completely solved hallucinations.
Anthropic isn’t saying that “Claude would never hallucinate again,” he said, though “it’s making it easier and easier to validate the numbers that you’re making very big decisions on.”
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