Anthropic Raises $3.5B in Series E Funding to Propel AI Innovation
Anthropic PBC, a prominent competitor in the artificial intelligence arena, has successfully closed a late-stage Series E funding round, amassing $3.5 billion. This investment values the company at a significant $61.5 billion.
This latest funding round follows a pattern of substantial investments, with Google LLC providing $1 billion less than two months prior. Furthermore, Amazon.com Inc. previously doubled its investment to an impressive $8 billion. Since September of the previous year, Amazon Web Services has been Anthropic’s primary cloud provider. Lightspeed Venture Partners spearheaded the most recent funding round, with participation from Cisco Investments, Salesforce Ventures, and several other investors.
Initially, Anthropic aimed to raise $2 billion, but strong investor interest prompted them to increase the target. The investment comes shortly after the debut of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic’s latest large language model. This model combines the characteristics of a standard language model with those of a reasoning model, with the company claiming significant improvements in math, physics, and programming capabilities relative to its predecessors.
One of the key features of Claude 3.7 Sonnet is the ability for developers to customize the time the model spends on a task. For time-sensitive applications, developers can limit the thinking time to a few seconds. Conversely, the cap can be raised to several minutes or more for complex tasks. Along with Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic also unveiled Claude Code, a novel agentic coding tool. Described as a command-line interface-embedded software, Claude Code can automate programming tasks that typically require over 45 minutes of manual work.
Anthropic has stated that the Series E funding will be used to enhance its AI systems and commission additional compute capacity. The company utilizes AWS instances, powered by AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, to support its model development. According to recent announcements, near-term development will prioritize improving Claude Code, specifically its ability to interact with external systems such as code repositories and enhancing its “self-knowledge of its capabilities.”
Moreover, a portion of the new funding will be directed toward research into mechanistic interpretability, an approach that seeks to understand how large language models make decisions. Anthropic researchers have previously used this method to study how the earlier versions of Claude represent concepts. The company hopes to gain valuable insights into the data processing methods of large language models to create safer AI systems.
“This investment fuels our development of more intelligent and capable AI systems that expand what humans can achieve, while deepening our understanding of how these systems work,” stated Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s Chief Financial Officer.
In addition to research, Anthroscopic is undertaking an international expansion initiative. Furthering its global expansion, the company recently appointed a former Google DeepMind research scientist to lead its new Zurich office and has also established a branch in Dublin, Ireland. According to Bloomberg, Anthropic surpassed $1 billion in annualized recurring revenue the previous year and has reportedly experienced a 30% growth in the past two months. The company, which operates an OpenAI-like chatbot and an application programming interface that allows developers to integrate Claude into their applications, is not yet profitable.
