The AI startup behind Claude, the rival product to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is raising $2 billion in fresh funding, sources confirmed to Forbes.
As Anthropic’s valuation soars to $60 billion, the AI startup is set to mint seven new billionaires among its founding team, Forbes has determined.
The generative AI company, which makes the popular chatbot Claude, is set to raise $2 billion in a new funding round led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, two sources with knowledge of those talks confirmed to Forbes on Wednesday. The round will value Anthropic at $60 billion after investment, the sources said, adding that the deal’s terms were closed but not yet finalized.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the pending fundraise.
At Anthropic’s new valuation, each of its seven founders — CEO Dario Amodei, president Daniela Amodei and cofounders Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Christopher Olah — are set to become billionaires. Forbes estimates that each cofounder will continue to hold more than 2% of Anthropic’s equity each, meaning their net worths are at least $1.2 billion.
Lightspeed and Anthropic both declined to comment.
As recently as 2023, the Amodei siblings and their five cofounders each held equal stakes of more than 6% equity in Anthropic, per a cap table document reviewed by Forbes. Since then, Anthropic has raised billions in additional funding. In early 2024, it raised more than $1 billion in a round led by Menlo Ventures at a $15 billion pre-money valuation (an unusual round detailed by Forbes); this past November, tech giant Amazon, already a major investor, committed a fresh $4 billion.
Over that period, as Anthropic continued to allocate equity to investors, strategic partners and its own employee base, Forbes estimates that each of Anthropic’s founders’ stakes was diluted to between 2% and 3%, per company filings and conversations with multiple sources with knowledge of Anthropic’s fundraising history. At 2% flat, each founder’s stake would be worth $1.2 billion following the pending raise.
Founded in 2021 after its team departed from OpenAI, Anthropic has since emerged as one of the ChatGPT maker’s largest, and highest-valued, rivals. OpenAI, which was initially a non-profit, helped kickstart the current AI boom with the release of that popular large language model interface in late 2022. Valued in October at $157 billion, it remains the biggest independent player, competing with the likes of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook. It is in the process of transitioning into a for-profit business.
But Anthropic and Elon Musk’s rival business, xAI, continue to nip at OpenAI’s heels. Last month, xAI announced it had raised $6 billion of its own at a valuation of more than $40 billion, taking its total funding to about $12 billion after just a year-plus of operation. (That makes Musk’s estimated 54% stake worth more than $20 billion.) Besides raising its own billions, Anthropic has stayed busy, launching in summer 2024 an updated family of models called Claude 3.5 that CEO Amodei told Forbes at the time was continuing a trend of such technology getting smarter, faster and more affordable. This past October, Anthropic unveiled computer use, the ability to direct Claude to operate a computer similar to how a human would.
As new AI billionaires, Anthropic’s founders will join ranks that include Musk (net worth: $417 billion, mostly concentrated in Tesla shares); OpenAI CEO Sam Altman($1.1 billion) and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang ($2 billion). Altman and husband Oliver Mulherin signed The Giving Pledge last year, committing to give a majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes.
With OpenAI set to transition its business to a fully for-profit structure and investors continuing to pour billions into challengers, Anthropic’s cofounders are unlikely to be the only AI billionaires minted in 2025. Others, such as leaders at billion-dollar-plus valued startups Mistral AI, Cohere, Safe Superintelligence and Perplexity, may not be far behind.
This story was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
