OpenAI's Rival Anthropic Raises $130 Billion, Becoming World's Fourth Most Valuable Unicorn

On September 2nd local time, AI company Anthropic announced the completion of a $130 billion (approximately RMB 9.28 trillion) Series F funding round. The round was led by ICONIQ Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Co., and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Following this round, Anthropic's valuation reached $1.83 trillion (approximately RMB 13 trillion), making it the world's fourth most valuable unicorn, behind only SpaceX (~$3.5 trillion), ByteDance (~$3.3 trillion), and OpenAI.

This is the second funding round Anthropic has secured this year. In March, Anthropic announced it had raised $35 billion at a post-money valuation of $615 billion. That round was led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, Fidelity Investments, among others. In just over half a year, Anthropic's valuation has surged by 200%.

This is also the second-largest funding round in the large language model industry to date, second only to OpenAI's historic $400 billion raise. At the end of March, OpenAI announced it had raised $400 billion in a new round led by SoftBank Group, reaching a post-investment valuation of $3 trillion. OpenAI stated it plans to use the funds to further advance AI research and expand computing infrastructure.

Anthropic is OpenAI's largest competitor, and its founding team also hails from OpenAI. In 2021, Anthropic was founded by seven former OpenAI employees, including siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei, who were deeply involved in multiple research projects at OpenAI such as GPT-3 and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).

Public information shows that prior to this round, Anthropic had completed 8 funding rounds, raising approximately $170 billion (approximately RMB 12.16 trillion). Investors include Google, Amazon, Salesforce's venture capital arm Salesforce Ventures, and Zoom Video Communications.

Unlike OpenAI's ChatGPT, which attracts a large number of individual users and has significant influence in the C-end (consumer) market, Anthropic focuses more on the B-end (enterprise) market. Its annual revenue of approximately $8.75 billion primarily comes from the sales of its enterprise product, Claude Enterprise.