Inside AI Unicorn Anthropic’s Unusual $750 Million Fundraise

While artificial intelligence startup OpenAI reportedly ended the year discussing a fundraise at a valuation of $100 billion or more, one of its leading challengers, Anthropic, was accepting a round of its own. Appearing almost modest in comparison, Anthropic was raising $750 million in new funding that would nearly quadruple its valuation to $18.4 billion.

New details of the unusual round, which remains in progress, reveal how lead investor Menlo Ventures used an increasingly popular tactic to jump to the front: a special purpose vehicle, or SPV. The impetus to do the round, according to multiple sources, came from an opportunistic Menlo seeking to double down on a position in one of AI’s leading unicorns ahead of a potential larger round later in 2024, once Anthropic’s revenue had grown. For a previously small shareholder, it was a power play. For Anthropic, a painless way to burnish its war chest amid a hiring and product race.

Anthropic hadn’t been planning to do a round at the end of 2023 at all: the startup had previously signaled to interested investors that it preferred to wait until the second half of 2024 to make a formal fundraising push, according to four people with knowledge of the process. But Menlo’s offer made sense: the company gained a cash infusion at a critical juncture with minimal fuss, while also formalizing terms for two others promised by key cloud computing partners, Amazon and Google.

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