Anthropic’s powerful brothers, Dario and Daniela Amodei, and five of their co-founders will all hold stakes worth more than billions of dollars in the AI company.
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The AI startup behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT rival Claude has raised $2 billion in new funding, sources confirmed to Forbes.
As Anthropic’s valuation soars to $60 billion, the AI startup is on track to create seven new billionaires from its founding team, Forbes determined.
The generative AI company behind the popular chatbot Claude plans to raise $2 billion in a new funding round led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to two people familiar with those negotiations. A People source confirmed to Forbes on Wednesday. The round values Anthropic at $60 billion after the investment, the sources said, adding that the terms of the deal have been completed but have not yet been finalized.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on the pending financing.
Anthropic’s new valuation includes the company’s seven founders: CEO Dario Amodei, President Daniela Amodei, and co-founders Thom Browne, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, and Christopher.・Oler) are expected to become millionaires. Forbes estimates that each co-founder will continue to own more than 2% of Anthropic, meaning their net worth will be at least $1.2 billion.
Both Lightspeed and Anthropic declined to comment.
As of 2023, the Amodei brothers and their five co-founders each held equal ownership of more than 6% of Anthropic, according to cap table documents reviewed by Forbes. Since then, Anthropic has raised billions of dollars in additional funding. In early 2024, the company raised more than $1 billion in a round led by Menlo Ventures at a pre-money valuation of $15 billion (an unusual round detailed by Forbes). In November of this year, tech giant Amazon, already a big investor, made a new investment of $4 billion.
During that period, Anthropic continued to allocate shares to its investors, strategic partners and its own employee base, so Anthropic’s founders each had a stake of 2. Forbes estimates that it has diluted from 3% to 3%. Anthropic’s Fundraising History. At a fixed interest rate of 2%, each founder’s stake will be worth $1.2 billion after the pending raise.
Founded in 2021 after the team split from OpenAI, Anthropic has since emerged as one of the ChatGPT maker’s biggest and most valuable competitors. Initially a nonprofit organization, OpenAI released its popular large-scale language model interface in late 2022, sparking the current AI boom. With a valuation of $157 billion as of October, it remains the largest independent company and competes with the likes of Alphabet. , the parent company of Google, Meta, the parent company of Facebook. We are in the process of converting it into a commercial business.
But Anthropic and Elon Musk’s rival business, xAI, continues to follow OpenAI’s lead. Last month, xAI announced that it had independently raised $6 billion at a valuation of more than $40 billion, bringing its total funding to approximately $12 billion in just over a year of operation. (This would make Musk’s estimated 54% stake worth more than $20 billion.) In addition to raising billions of dollars for itself, Anthropic will launch an update called Claude 3.5 in summer 2024. At the time, CEO Amodei told Forbes that this trend was continuing. Such technology is becoming smarter, faster and more affordable. In October of this year, Anthropic announced computer usage, the ability to instruct Claude to interact with a computer just like a human would.
Anthropic’s founders will join the ranks of new AI billionaires, including Musk (net worth: $417 billion, mostly in Tesla stock). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman ($1.1 billion) and Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang ($2 billion). Last year, Altman and her husband, Oliver Mulherin, signed the Giving Pledge, pledging to donate the majority of their wealth to charity.
Anthropic’s co-founder likely won’t be the only AI billionaire born in 2025, as OpenAI plans to move its business to a fully for-profit structure and investors continue to pour billions into the challenger. Other leaders in startups with market caps of over $1 billion, including Mistral AI, Cohere, Safe SuperIntelligence, and Perplexity, may not be far behind.
