Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is reportedly in advanced talks to raise $2 billion in a funding round that would value it at $60 billion.
The $60 billion valuation would include the money the company plans to raise in the round, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Tuesday (Jan. 7), citing unnamed sources.
Anthropic did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
The reported valuation would also be an increase from the $18 billion at which the company was valued in a 2024 funding round and would make Anthropic the fifth-most valuable U.S. startup, according to the WSJ report.
Anthropic’s annualized revenue recently reached $875 million, per the report.
Other AI companies have seen their valuations increase in recent months amid growing investor confidence that the technology could revolutionize industries and create new opportunities, PYMNTS reported Oct. 3.
OpenAI said Oct. 2 that it raised $6.6 billion in a funding round that valued it at $157 billion. The ChatGPT creator said it planned to use the capital to boost its leadership in frontier AI research, expand computational capacity and enhance its suite of problem-solving tools.
It was reported Nov. 20 that xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup, raised $5 billion in a funding round that valued it at $50 billion — up from the $24 billion at which it was valued in spring 2024. The company said it planned to use the money to add another 100,000 Nvidia chips for training its AI models.
Another AI startup, Perplexity AI, reportedly closed a $500 million funding round in December that tripled its valuation to $9 billion. Perplexity AI started 2024 with a valuation of $520 million.
Anthropic’s backers include Amazon, which invested another $4 billion in the AI startup in November after making an initial investment of $4 billion in it in September 2023.
Amazon said in a Nov. 22 press release that millions of end users and tens of thousands of customers — including startups, enterprises and government institutions — were using Anthropic’s Claude in Amazon Bedrock.
“The response from [Amazon Web Services (AWS)] customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said in the release.
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