Anthropic's Next Move: Exploring Talks to Raise Another $2B

0:28So the AI startup Anthropic is in the headlines. Anthropik to go and look for other funding. I think the potential deal they're working on right now kind of spotlights this like prevailing enthusiasm among tech leaders to kind of stake their claim on Silicon Valley's AI sector. This is obviously a hot sector and Anthropik is one of the biggest players in the space. So a lot of people are just essentially trying to make safe bets by just betting on who's already raised the most money, who's kind of already the most far ahead not make taking some of the risky bets on earlier stage companies now i think what's really interesting that we've all found out um by analyzing the market recently is uh there's recently some charts that came out kind of showing uh who invested at what point in instacart's um shares so the winners from instacart because of course it just went public and so kind of after it goes public and you see where the final stocks fall and where everything ends um that's kind of like the official market valuation for instacart and then you can kind of look back at all of the different funding rounds and see who invested how much they invested and so how much every everyone made so pretty much what we found from instacart is that early investors of course seed series a series b these people were all winners um as the as the round started to go more and more and more forward you got into what's called growth stage rounds where essentially the company's already kind of grown we see it has a product market fit it's getting some mass adoption and they're just raising money to help them like exponentially grow faster all of those rounds after the ipo price gave it its final valuation actually were down so people like softbank people like tiger global some of these massive companies came in invested a ton of money for growth rounds and they actually lost money on this thing so i'm interested to see you know how that same strategy is going to be playing out with some of these ai deals like we see with anthropic years are just raising more and more you know billions and billions more um if the people putting money in today, putting billions into Anthropic today are going to have the same fate as kind of this whole Instacart growth round investors.

2:25So while the valuation for Anthropic hasn't been locked down as of now, I think insiders familiar with the matter on this current kind of round of funding that they're trying to do, you know, apparently remained anonymous, which of course is always, you know, you got to take it with a grain of salt when you got anonymous insiders. But they've hinted that the valuation could be around 30 billion dollars a number that initially was mentioned by the by some tech news platforms specifically the information which kind of they haven't often the information has inside scoops on all of these new ai companies they've had a lot of you know successful accurate scoops on open ai for example and some other players in the space so you know still take it with a grain of salt when there's an anonymous source but in any case if anthropic does manage to seal the deal on this funding round i think it's going to underscore the huge momentum behind startups specializing in the creation of foundational models, right?

3:16Not just people building AI tools on top of them, but the actual foundational models themselves. I think these models, of course, known for their capability to pretty much suck in a ton of data. Essentially what ChatGPT is doing, they're then, you know, spit out and used for tons of different tools. People use them for, you know, essentially integrate them into all of the, these different AI startups that we see today. So I think very cool. However, they do come with a very hefty price tag in terms of operations so because of this startups in this space included anthropic and of course open ai are always it seems on the lookout for more you know fuel to feed the the giant money pile that is training these ai models so i think their kind of quest for capital right now isn't just a startup story i think big tech behemoths are also not kind of sitting by earlier this year, Google's parent company Alphabet put$450 million into Anthropic.

4:11Amazon's involvement in Anthropic doesn't stop at funding. They've also stepped up as the startup's main cloud computing supplier. And I think that's actually why Amazon and AWS gave Anthropic like the$4 billion deal or$1.6 billion deal is because they wanted them to come onto AWS to do all their computing. So they kind of knew they'd get some of that money back. So really they're kind of offering them chips. So not to be outdone, Microsoft has committed another, or I think earlier this year, sorry, Microsoft committed, of course,$10 billion to open AI. So really, a lot of these big players are backing these startups to very large sums of money.

4:50So I think the kind of unwavering interest from Anthropix corporate allies in championing it is very evident. However, I would say that some sources suggest that sealing this new deal might hinge on the participation of major financial institutions, so particularly Wall Street or some of the dominant venture capital firms. And these kind of partners would definitely play a pivotal role in finalizing a company's valuation and kind of spearheading the round. However, a lot of these firms at the same time right now have been struggling to raise fresh rounds of funding when we're talking about some of the big venture capital firms.

5:29So they tend to be a little bit slower right now. Honestly, I hear they do. They are making plays. They are making investments. But when I'm hearing a lot of these like huge plays into this AI space, it's coming from like Microsoft, Google, Amazon. It's coming from big tech companies that are profitable that are or, you know, generating a lot of revenue that can put money into these things. So as a little background established back in 2021 by a bunch of different open AI alumni. Anthropic has been growing really fast. And I think, you know, it definitely is coming out with some good products.

6:04It has Claude, which I personally use because you can put like huge, like chunks of text, you can like get it to print. You upload pretty much an entire PDF to Claude, like of a book, like a, you know, a hundred page book and ask it questions about it and it'll be able to pull stuff out. So like, that's very very cool i think um it's not just about efficiency it's also kind of crafted to have a human touch is what they say really it's like kind of like a super safe personal bot that's like what claude and anthropics like idea is in any case i think only time is going to tell if anthropics you know impressive fundraising journey is going to realize its full potential but i think it's clear that this ai gold rush right now is far from over if they're going and looking for another two billion dollars is a very hot area a lot of people are going to be looking at it so definitely a very interesting company to follow