Anthropic Makes OpenAI Look Cheap—Again

Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic. Photo by Getty.

Well that didn’t take long!

We’re barely a week into the new year and already we’ve reported that Anthropic is in talks to raise $2 billion in new funding at a $60 billion post-investment valuation. Lightspeed Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that’s also backed rival AI developers including Mistral, Stability AI and Cartesia, is set to lead the deal.

That valuation is not cheap, even by AI standards. Anthropic recently passed $875 million in annualized revenue—a measure of the past month's revenue multiplied by 12. At that level, the ongoing round, excluding the new capital, would value the company at about 66 times forward revenue.

To put that in perspective, AI data analytics firm Databricks raised capital at a similar valuation in December while being on track to pass $3 billion in annualized revenue this month—more than three times higher than Anthropic’s figure. (Interestingly, Lightspeed also invested in that Databricks round.)