The Scale of $13B: Anthropic’s Raise

0:00Anthropik has just raised$13 billion in a Series F at$183 billion valuation. Today on the podcast, I want to talk about basically their meteoric rise, their last rounds of funding, how much of$13 billion. app builder. So if you've ever wanted to be able to basically build an app with no code, an AI workflow where you prompt like you would to chat GPT and explain the tool you want and have us create it, I would love for you to go check it out on AIbox.ai. I've built a bunch of really interesting tools recently. One of them is a YouTube generator, and they can create thumbnails and scripts and ideas for stories that I'll be writing.

0:55So I think there's a lot of really amazing possibilities that you can see in the space, but you can go to the platform, describe your tool and have it automatically generated. So if that sounds interesting to you, you can go over to AIbox.ai and check it out. I would love to hear your thoughts. We're always adding new features. All right, let's get over to what's happening with Anthropic. So they just raised this$13 billion. And what's really interesting here is this came from a bunch of different investors. Now, once you start getting into these higher numbers, you have a certain group of investors that tends to be into these, you're not getting a lot of the smaller VCs, you're getting a lot of the bigger players.

1:28And so here we have Fidelity Management and Research Company, Lightspeed Venture Partners. They also have Coat, D1 Capital Partners, Insight Partners, the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, which as a Canadian, I always think is funny that yeah, I feel like Ottawa and Ontario, they have these like pension plans that are always investing in stuff. And you hear about them usually when they invest in something like FTX, and it goes bankrupt. And then you know, they're like complaining that the company going bankrupt is like bad for teachers because their pensions are getting lost. And I'm like, why are we investing pensions and startups that, you know, aren't always 100 % guaranteed to grow?

2:03Anyways, the that's, you know, I think those are some of the ones you'd expect. They also had BlackRock and Blackstone Invest. And they also had the Qatar Investment Authority. Now, the Qatar Investment Authority, I think is actually the one that Dario Almedeo is kind of complaining about. It's interesting, because obviously, it's his choice if he wants to let them into the round. But he was talking to Wired recently. And he said that he wasn't, quote unquote, thrilled about taking money from sovereign wealth funds of dictatorial governments. But he said it's difficult to run a business by excluding, quote unquote, bad guys from investing.

2:38So it's kind of interesting. He, you know, he's literally complaining about the people giving him money, but he's taking the money and saying he has no other option. So I don't know, it feels like virtue signaling while taking the money. Also, I'm really curious what the Qatari Investment Authority's opinion is on this to have someone that they're investing in call them bad guys. I just feel like it's kind of a weird situation. Very interesting. There's a memo that got leaked to Wired apparently that he wrote to the company when he started doing the round. In any case, I think this is from a financial standpoint, this is pretty big.

3:08$13 billion is obviously massive, especially considering the last round they raised was$3.5 billion. So$3.5 billion to$13 billion, like they're$10 billion more than last time. And last time they were at a$61 billion valuation, and now they're at$186 billion. So they more than doubled the valuation. They more than doubled how much money they're raising. These companies are growing just at an absolutely astronomical rate. And what's interesting is there was actually a whole bunch of reporting that Anthropoc was getting close to a deal that was like$3 to$5 billion, and they were going to get to like$170 billion valuation.

3:41Well, turns out they got the valuation up and they completely blew everyone out of the water with how much money they were able to raise which i think just shows how much appetite there is to get into one of these top tier ai companies they've seen some really big growth too i think that kind of backs this up they basically reported a jump in their annual recurring revenue from 1 billion to 5 billion dollars so that is that alone is pretty massive and this is just over the course of 2025, right? So just this year, you know, six, six plus months in, and they're going from one to $5 billion. Really, really crazy.

4:13They have over 300 ,000 business customers, a bunch of their large accounts represent over$100 ,000 in run rate revenue. Of those, they have grown nearly 7x in the last year, 300 ,000 companies paying them over$100 ,000. I think this is where a lot of their money comes from. They also, of course, have Claude Code, which is a developer favorite. We use it at AI Box to help in our development, and it has sped it up a ton, and it's absolutely incredible. I'll be 100 % honest. And basically, from Claude Code, they said that that product alone generates more than$500 million in run rate revenue, and it's grown more than 10x in the last three months.

4:50So three months ago, less than$50 million. Today, over$500 million. I completely understand why it's basically the greatest thing on planet Earth if you're a developer. I think all of this is really impressive. We've seen some really impressive growth. This is why everyone wants to get into this. You know, I'd be interested to see the exact dollar amount each of these companies is putting in. And it seems at this point that OpenAI or the Anthropic knows they're competing with OpenAI and a bunch of other big companies at a high level. And they'll just basically take whatever money they can because they know if they want to be able to compete with OpenAI and Google and Amazon and everyone else, although Amazon, I guess, is technically a partner, but no doubt will be a competitor the same way OpenAI and Microsoft are kind of competitors, but also partners, they know that they need to basically get an insane amount of money.

5:34So$13 billion is probably Anthropics scooping up everything they can, especially because we had earlier reports that, you know, they're going to raise like three to$5 billion. And, you know, if they had last raised three, 3.5, and then now they're raising 5 billion, it would seem like sort of natural. But when you start looking at the amounts of money that OpenAI is raising, they're, they're obviously raising way more way faster. And in addition to that, You also have to look at like what XAI has raised total, which I believe is over like $20 billion. And so I think they've been a leader in the AI space for some time.

6:05They don't want to lose that lead. You have companies, I believe XAI at a moment, well, now that this raise is done, they're definitely number two behind OpenAI. But I believe XAI might have leapfrogged them to become the second most funded AI company. And so I think, you know, a new company that's been around for like a year, leapfrogging them probably didn't feel good. And so they knew in order to compete at a high level, they needed to raise a lot of money. And a lot of this, you know, comes down to the fact that in order to be able to play in this space, a lot of these companies you see open AI with like Project Stargate starting to build their own data centers and work on like the actual infrastructure layer.

6:38And so I think when you start looking at this, it's beyond just data, it's beyond just training, it's beyond just getting the chips, but there's so much more that goes into building these absolutely massive companies and there's so much funding that can be used. Another thing that I do think is interesting is it feels like one of these rounds of funding barely wraps up before the next one starts. I feel like with OpenAI, every time they announce they close a round of funding, everyone has the shock factor and then it's like three to six months later they announce some sort of new round of funding.

7:07I think we've seen a lot of companies that do these really rapid rounds of funding. And case in point is that they last like Anthropic last raised$3.5 billion in March. OK, so we have March, April, May, June, July and August. And so five months later, they raise again. Right. So we're not doing like every year you do a raise or every two years you do a raise. Right. The runway isn't 12 months or 18 months. We're talking like four months, five months. And they're just grabbing astronomical amounts of money. And they're getting it from the biggest investors who are happy to give it to them, by the way, because if you look at their revenue, it's it's growing insane, right?

7:43Like Claude Code, three months, it's up 10x. These things just feel absolutely insatiable. I think that, you know, for all intents and purposes right now, there's so much room to grow that these companies, I think will keep seeing really strong growth for a while. I saw some comments over on X where basically people were commenting on this new round of funding that they did. And they were like, Oh, sweet cloud, or, you know, Anthropic just raised more money, tokens should be cheap for the next six months. This is fantastic news. So I think for like a lot of users and developers, they're happy, because if Anthropic wasn't able to raise money, they'd probably have to increase the prices of a lot of their services.

8:18One of those things that I do think is kind of interesting in regards to cloud code, they actually recently did increase the prices in some ways, or basically, I added rate limits. And a lot of people complained about them and i'm wondering if the reason they didn't add the rate limits sooner was because they saw like basically they were growing so fast and they knew they could just do another round of funding if they could say look we got 10x uh growth on like cloud code for example so one of those things was yeah they made a lot of people mad by adding rate limits to some of the developer tools but they said to be fair some people were paying like for the 200 cloud code max plan and they were getting they said that people were getting like they would pay 200 a month and they were getting like$20 ,000 worth of tokens out of it because they were running it 24 seven or they had, yeah, basically they're, they're like abusing it.

9:02They were letting some people were like getting one account and then they were renting it out to people. So multiple people could be using the same account and just using, you know, their quote unquote unlimited tokens. So if someone could pay$20 and, and spend a$20 ,000 worth of tokens, obviously that's an insane deal. And I think that that probably contributed to their massive growth. Like it It literally became the number one tool for developers because it's so cheap compared to anything else. It's getting so much done. It has big context windows. You can basically attach it to your entire code base.

9:30It can look at all the context of everything and write code. And it feels very magical, but it definitely is expensive. And they were definitely losing a lot of money on it, which I think contributed to the growth. And so I think that's kind of the perfect timing where they did that right before they close the round of funding, right? They can go to their investors and say, we just saw 10x growth on this at$500 million. Maybe they're losing$600 million on those users, but it looks fantastic. And then they can say, and we just shut down, you know, like the thing that made it not profitable. So now it's gonna be super profitable.

9:59They go raise $13 billion and they move on happily. So I mean, this is basically nothing new from Anthropic. We see this from all tech startups. It feels like they kind of spend money to acquire users, but this does feel like it's a really insane scale. Finally have these companies that can be raising every five months, multi-billion dollar rounds because they're making so much money. So So very, very, very interesting. Thank you so much for tuning in to the podcast today. If you appreciate it or learned anything new, I would love it if you could leave a review for the podcast over on Apple or Spotify.

10:28Just helps the podcast out a ton to get shown to people like yourself. And make sure to go check out AIbox.ai. Our new AI app builder is live and we are super excited about it. Thanks so much and catch you next time.