Anthropic raises $3.5B at $61.5B valuation

The artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic said on Monday that it had completed a new fund-raising deal that valued the company at $61.5 billion, up from about $16 billion a little more than a year ago. Led by the venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, the new round will pump an additional $3.5 billion into the company. Since its founding in 2021, Anthropic has raised more than $14.8 billion from venture firms like Menlo Ventures and tech giants like Amazon, Google and Salesforce. The deal comes amid a surge in funding activity for the industry’s most prominent A.I. start-ups. OpenAI is set to complete a $40 billion fund-raising deal that would value the company at $300 billion, nearly double its valuation from just five months ago. Elon Musk’s xAI is in talks for a new financing round that could value it at as much as $75 billion, up from about $40 billion just two months ago, two people with knowledge of the discussions said. OpenAI started the A.I. boom in late 202 ... Read full article.