Anthropic, the AI startup best known for its chatbot named Claude, has raised over $3.5 billion in its latest funding round, giving it a valuation of $61.5 billion. The new funding has positioned the OpenAI rival as one of the largest startups in the world. The Series E round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which contributed $1 billion, according to Anthropic. Other new and existing investors who hedged their bets on the company include Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, among others. Anthropic is also backed by tech giants Amazon and Google, which had previously announced additional investments of $4 billion and $1 billion, respectively. The new capital raised by Anthropic is expected to fuel its competition with OpenAI, which is in talks to raise funds at a staggering $300 billion valuation, according to a report by Bloomberg. These developments signal that Silicon Valley investors are undeterred by the emergence of smaller challengers such as Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which has claimed to develop cost-efficient AI models on par with OpenAI's o1 model. Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, Anthropic’s higher valuation comes amid rapid growth of its AI business. The company’s annual revenue run rate was about $1 billion last year, which has increased by 30 per cent in 2025 so far, Bloomberg said in its report. Anthropic said that it will use the newly raised capital to expand its computing capacity, bolster research efforts, and develop the next generation of its AI systems. It also has plans of accelerating its expansion in Asia and Europe. “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,” Krishna Rao, the chief financial officer of Anthropic, said in a statement. “These capabilities are driving remarkable outcomes for our customers as our business and consumer usage continue to grow rapidly,” he added. The US-based AI company introduced its latest AI model – Claude 3.7 Sonnet – with an array of improvements aimed at developers. Anthropic’s foundational AI models are also being used to power Amazon’s new and improved version of its voice assistant called Alexa+.
