Anthropic Seeks $170 Billion Valuation in Iconiq-Led Funding Round

Anthropic reportedly aims to raise $5 billion in a funding round that would value it at $170 billion.

The artificial intelligence (AI) startup’s funding round is set to be led by Iconiq Capital, an investment group that manages the wealth of Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, the Financial Times (FT) reported Tuesday (July 29), citing unnamed sources.

Iconiq Capital submitted the proposed terms for the funding round to Anthropic, according to the report.

Anthropic did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

According to the FT report, a $170 billion valuation would make Anthropic one of the world’s most valuable private tech companies, behind OpenAI’s $300 billion valuation and SpaceX’s $400 billion valuation.

Reports of the valuation sought by Anthropic have increased over the last couple of weeks. Earlier reports, which noted that the talks around the funding round were in their early stages, said Friday (July 25) that the company aimed for a $150 billion valuation, and said July 16 that it was looking for a $100 billion valuation.

Anthropic gained a $61.5 billion post-money valuation in its most recent funding round, which was announced in March and raised $3.5 billion.

The company said at the time in a press release that businesses have integrated its large language model (LLM), Claude, to perform tasks like turning natural language into code, assisting tax professionals, accelerating the writing of clinical study reports and helping power Amazon’s Alexa+.

Anthropic introduced its first industry-specific service, Claude for Financial Services, on July 15, saying this is an out-of-the-box generative AI solution tailored to analysts, portfolio managers and underwriters at large financial institutions.

“Where we saw a lot of traction early on was with these high-trust industries,” Jonathan “JP” Pelosi, head of FSI at Anthropic, told PYMNTS at the time in an interview. “Our models, our solutions, are just very well positioned to help these firms.”

According to Tuesday’s FT report, Anthropic’s annual recurring revenue has quadrupled since the beginning of the year, reaching $4 billion. The company has also benefited from investor interest in AI startups.