The $380 billion valuation of artificial intelligence startup Anthropic solidifies its place among the world’s most valuable startups, along with rival OpenAI and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Investors will be closely monitoring these companies this year to determine whether they will go public on Wall Street.
Angelo Bochanis, an associate at Renaissance Capital, which studies the possibility of IPOs, said, “These are the three biggest names that could go public this year.”
The founder of the chatbot Claude, Anthropic, announced on Thursday that its valuation has increased following a $30 billion round of funding led by the U.S.-based investment firm Coatue and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, among dozens of other significant investors.
A portion of the $15 billion that Nvidia and Microsoft announced they would invest in Anthropic in November is also included in the funding.
This is part of an agreement that would eventually bind Anthropic to purchasing from Microsoft the approximately $30 billion in processing power it needs to develop and operate AI systems like French.
Google and Amazon, two cloud service providers, have also strongly supported Anthropic.
Krishna Rao, chief financial officer of Anthropic, said the company will continue to develop AI models and “enterprise-grade products” with the influx of financing.
Anthropic is ranked third among the most valuable private companies by Renaissance Capital.
It powers the $500 billion startup OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The rocket manufacturer SpaceX, which recently joined with Musk’s AI startup xAI, the creator of the chatbot Grok, is ahead of both San Francisco-based AI firms.
Despite not being profitable, Anthropic stated on Thursday that it is expected to reach $14 billion in sales in the upcoming year, which represents a sharp increase from “its first dollar in revenue” less than three years ago.
Anthropic has customized Claude products to be a workplace assistant on jobs like software engineering, whereas OpenAI has experimented with various revenue strategies, such as digital advertising.
In 2021, former workers of OpenAI launched Anthropic.
Dario Amodei, the company’s co-founder and CEO, has pledged to put more emphasis on the security of artificial general intelligence, the superior technology that both San Francisco companies want to develop.
This week, Anthropic also revealed a new $20 million nonpartisan group aimed at influencing US AI regulations.
In late 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, showcasing the enormous commercial potential of AI large language models that might assist with answering queries, writing emails, and writing computer code.
In 2023, Anthropic released its initial iteration of Claude.
Bochanis said the business that makes the first IPO will have “an opportunity to raise even more money.” “You can use it as a chance to make headlines and improve your public image.”
If businesses keep losing more money than they make, they may have to invite the public to examine their business strategies.
Although values are always increasing, Bochanis stated that private markets have been hurling dozens of billions of dollars at these businesses.
There is likely to be a bit more monitoring in public markets. A stock might plummet after only one earnings report.
