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Anthropic raises $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion valuation

Led by Lightspeed, the round was pitched around Claude's traction in enterprise and agentic coding rather than consumer chat, funding compute and interpretability research.

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Anthropic announced a $3.5 billion Series E funding round at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Bessemer, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital, Fidelity, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and other investors. The company said the capital would go toward expanding compute capacity, continuing research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and international expansion.

The announcement framed the raise explicitly around enterprise adoption and coding, rather than consumer products. Anthropic pointed to Claude 3.7 Sonnet, released the previous week, as setting “a new high-water mark in coding abilities,” and cited Replit’s integration of Claude into an autonomous coding agent as driving substantial revenue growth for that company. The pitch to investors was that Claude’s commercial traction was increasingly coming from businesses building agentic tools on top of the model rather than from a chat product competing directly with ChatGPT.

The round put Anthropic well below OpenAI’s contemporaneous valuation — OpenAI had closed a $6.6 billion round at a $157 billion valuation the previous October — but confirmed Anthropic as the clear second-placed US frontier lab by private-market pricing, ahead of xAI and Google’s internal DeepMind unit, which was not separately valued. As with comparable rounds elsewhere in the industry, Anthropic disclosed no audited revenue figures alongside the announcement; investors were pricing anticipated enterprise growth and compute requirements rather than an established revenue multiple.

The round continued a pattern of rapid valuation growth across frontier labs through 2025. Anthropic returned to market six months later, raising $13 billion at a $183 billion valuation — very nearly tripling its valuation in two quarters, without an intervening flagship model release of comparable scale, illustrating how much of that capital was pricing anticipated compute needs and enterprise contract growth ahead of realised revenue.