Artificial intelligence company Anthropic says it's now valued at $380 billion, cementing its position alongside rival OpenAI and Elon Musk's SpaceX in a trio of the world's most valuable startups that investors will watch closely this year to see if they'll become publicly traded. "These are the three biggest names that could go public this year," said Angelo Bochanis of Renaissance Capital, which researches the potential for initial public offerings, per the AP. Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, said Thursday its valuation grew after it raised $30 billion in its latest round of funding, led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and the US-based investment firm Coatue, along with dozens of other major investors.
The funding also includes a portion of the $15 billion that Nvidia and Microsoft said they would invest in Anthropic in November, part of a deal that would eventually commit Anthropic to buying from Microsoft some $30 billion in computing capacity it needs to build and run AI systems like Claude. Anthropic has also been heavily backed by cloud providers Amazon and Google. Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao says the company will use the surge of investments to continue building "enterprise-grade products" and AI models.
Renaissance Capital counts Anthropic as third among the most valuable private firms. It's behind ChatGPT maker OpenAI, valued at $500 billion. And both San Francisco-based AI companies trail rocket maker SpaceX, which recently merged with Musk's AI startup xAI, maker of the chatbot Grok. Anthropic isn't profitable, but the company said Thursday it's on track for sales of $14 billion over the next year. While OpenAI has dabbled in a number of revenue models, including digital ads, Anthropic has tailored Claude products to be a workplace assistant on tasks such as software engineering.
Whichever company does an IPO first will have "an opportunity to raise even more money," Bochanis said. "It's an opportunity to be a big headline and get that sort of boost to your public image." The risks are that the companies will have to invite public inspection of their business models as they continue to lose more money than they make. "Private markets have been throwing dozens of billions of dollars at these companies, even as valuations multiply again and again and again," Bochanis said. "With public markets, there's going to be a little more scrutiny. A single earnings report could tank a stock."