On Monday, Anthropic announced a joint venture focusing on deploying enterprise AI services. Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs will be founding partners in the new venture, which is backed by a group of VCs, hedge funds, and private equity firms, including Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green, and Sequoia Capital.
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported news of the partnership, reported the new venture was valued at $1.5 billion, which includes a $300 million commitment each from Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman.
The announcement comes just as Anthropic’s chief rival is preparing to make a similar move. Mere hours before the Anthropic announcement, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was raising funds for a new venture called The Development Company, along very similar lines. OpenAI’s venture would operate at a larger scale, raising $4 billion from 19 investors against a $10 billion valuation. Named investors include TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent and Bain Capital, with no apparent overlap in investment between the OpenAI venture and Anthropic’s competitor.
The overall logic of the two ventures is the same, raising money from alternative asset managers to create new channels for enterprise AI deals. The ventures will presumably get preferred sales access to their investors’ portfolio companies, while the investors will capture more value from any resulting contracts.
The new capital will also allow more engineering resources to be devoted to each individual, embracing the forward-deployed engineer (FDE) model popularized by Palantir.
As Anthropic put it in its announcement: “An engagement might begin with the company’s engineering team sitting down with clinicians and IT staff to build tools that fit into the workflows that staff already use… Engagements like this will run across mid-sized companies across industries, each shaped by the people closest to the work.”
The new ventures come as both AI labs fundraise at a blistering pace, while circling possible IPOs. OpenAI announced $122 billion in new funding at the end of March, against a valuation of $852 billion. TechCrunch reported last week that Anthropic is in the final stages of its own funding round, seeking $50 billion of new funding against a $900 billion valuation.
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