Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation(www.anthropic.com)
110 pointsby meetpateltech2 hours ago15 comments
  • cmiles8an hour ago
    Probably the bigger headline here is that they’ve blown past OpenAI in revenue and valuation, with OpenAI looking increasingly shaky and vulnerable.
    • Aurornis30 minutes ago
      Their valuations differ by about 13%. That's close enough that I wouldn't call it "blown past".

      Things change fast in this space. Anthropic had a big boost from having the premier coding model for a while, but GPT-5.5 has closed that gap at a time when a lot of Anthropic customers are looking for cheaper alternatives.

      Anthropic is coming off of a recent change to their enterprise billing that substantially changed the pricing for many users. They were smart to do the fundraising before the effects of that change could fully propagate.

      • cmiles827 minutes ago
        The acceleration rate has been extraordinary… they went from mostly unknown outside AI circles to the number one player almost overnight. If that’s no “blown past” I don’t know what is.
        • baal80spam17 minutes ago
          Do ordinary people really know what Anthropic is?
          • __s15 minutes ago
            They know that "claude's the good one"
          • cmiles813 minutes ago
            They know the cool kids have ditched OpenAI and now use Claude
    • alecco41 minutes ago
      Anthropic is at the mercy of 3rd party datacenter contracts. AFAIK OpenAI will soon run mostly on on their own GPUs.

      I don't like Altman and I am still upset about his memory deal last year but he prepared for the current shortages months before anybody else. Meanwhile, Anthropic seems to lack any plans besides third party contracting. IMHO they got very lucky with xAI and Google having spare capacity and willing to rent it. But what about next year?

      • lumost37 minutes ago
        Which also leaves OpenAI vulnerable to NVidia's aggressive pricing. To my knowledge Anthropic is relatively well positioned across multiple compute vendors/hardware providers.
      • dopa4236521 minutes ago
        The same 3rd party datacenters from the same few companies that everything else runs on? If there's demand, hyperscalers will supply.
      • thereitgoes45638 minutes ago
        Stargate is not real.

        It is not clear that running one's own datacenter is a competitive advantage. Why do you think OpenAI can handle that?

        • Gomotono24 minutes ago
          Stargate as a project is real, they only stoped the Stargate UK thing.

          Anthropics relativ longterm contract with xAI def shows that they can fill the capacity vs Musk not. OpenAI and Anthropic are both using a lot of capacity so its fair to say that this is an advantage.

          If they stay very close competitive (which they are), your own datacenter does reduce token price.

    • andy_ppp23 minutes ago
      I wonder if being consistently candid is a superior business strategy?
    • ignoramousan hour ago
      How? OpenAI and Antrophic are basically the Big 2 racing away at light speed; the others who can't get near them are may be shaky and vulnerable. And sure, there's a garden full of those.
      • cmiles8an hour ago
        Because the market almost certainly can’t support two foundation model labs given the increasingly little difference across models and the massive sums of cash required to keep it all going. There is no big 2, just a race to survive and be the big 1.
        • dchftcs42 minutes ago
          China will make sure they have a frontier lab, there's plenty of chance for Google to catch up once the compute crunch gets more serious.
        • an0malous42 minutes ago
          It probably can't support any because there's no moat and smaller, open source models are catching up. This is like investing $1T into mainframe computers in 1980.
        • solenoid0937an hour ago
          Disagree, both are coexisting fine today.
          • claytongulick5 minutes ago
            A series "H" for $65 billion and no path to profitability is existing fine?
          • 44 minutes ago
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      • andriy_koval33 minutes ago
        Google likely has its market share too, you can track how fast Cloud revenue increased.
    • wslh35 minutes ago
      This business and financial race is probably the craziest in human history, so zig-zags are expected. One company may take advantage on one curve while another is stuck in the pits.
    • henry202324 minutes ago
      “Caballo que alcanza, gana”
    • ripvanwinklean hour ago
      [dead]
    • fontainan hour ago
      I’m not so sure. We only need to look at Uber’s example of companies realizing they’re spending way too much and trying to rein it in. Claude has excellent revenue but it is highly dependent on very rich technology companies continuing to spend lavishly without seeing returns. The music will stop at some point and Anthropic will be hit the hardest. OpenAI may have less revenue but it is distributed across many, many more customers and use cases, it’s resilient. And even if Anthropic do, somehow, manage to keep their customers spending huge amounts on Claude, they’re very vulnerable to being undercut by OpenAI given codex is pretty much at parity. Anthropic seems more vulnerable to me.
      • Archonicalan hour ago
        I think it's somewhat guaranteed that the music will at least die down a little bit. We saw this with cloud companies being bitten by cloud cost optimization initiatives. I can't imagine we won't see the same with AI, especially as the workforce stops trying to tokenmaxx to save their role.
        • Gomotonoan hour ago
          If you look at the adoption curve of Claude, I don't think we have reached anything near peak.
      • Analemma_an hour ago
        Every week there's at least one post on the HN front page bitching about API errors from Claude because Anthropic doesn't have enough serving capacity. I really don't see any signs they're "spending too much", the actual evidence on the ground seems to be exactly the opposite: constant exasperation that they're not spending enough.
        • newaccountman2an hour ago
          What he means is the customers realizing they are spending too much on Anthropic.
        • fontainan hour ago
          I mean Anthropic’s customers are spending too much on Claude. Anthropic’s customers are encouraging tokenmaxxing amongst their employees; measuring employees by token usage. That’s great for Anthropic’s short term revenue numbers but terrible long term because at some point companies will realize tokenmaxxing is not good. OpenAI is much less exposed to tokenmaxxing, which is a good thing.
          • solenoid093733 minutes ago
            > at some point companies will realize tokenmaxxing is not good

            Why? Have we figured out the limits of what agents can do?

            > OpenAI is much less exposed to tokenmaxxing

            I don't think this is true, from my own experience & chatting with my acquaintances.

            • fontain18 minutes ago
              Tokenmaxxing is the practice of measuring employees by how many tokens they use, encouraging employees to burn tokens needlessly, it is unrelated to what agents can do.

              If a task can be completed with 100k tokens but employees are considered better performers if they complete it with 500k tokens instead… that’s unsustainable and cannot possibly benefit Anthropic in the long term.

              At some point, Amazon and Uber and so on and so forth are going to realize that actually, employees using 100k tokens or even 50k tokens is better than 500k and Anthropic’s revenue will fall off a cliff.

      • an hour ago
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  • GenerWorkan hour ago
    As someone who knows admittedly knows nothing about startup funding rounds, how many more rounds of funding can they do before an IPO? Is it effectively infinite?
    • tomwheeleran hour ago
      Effectively infinite. Databricks is a good example. They're still private after 13 years and closed a Series L round last year. Stripe is similar.

      Having been through an IPO before, it was good for employee liquidity, but bad for the culture and long-term success of the company.

    • dkdcdevan hour ago
      I believe the canonical example is Databricks on round L
      • nerdsniperan hour ago
        I believe Databricks series L round raised $4B in late 2025, but earlier this year they raised another $5B so technically they've maybe completed series M round and are "on" series N round now? The press releases are a bit confusing to me.
        • tomwheeleran hour ago
          It's semantics, but the latest raise might have been a follow-on to Series M, not a new round (to be clear, I know nothing about their finances, just speaking from experience at another company).
    • jmathaian hour ago
      I imagine there are ways for existing investors to achieve liquidity while still raising venture funding. But an IPO is "the" liquidity event and I imagine there will be pressure from investors for that.

      I also imagine that venture funding rounds have a lower ceiling than the public markets - but at these rounds I'm not so sure!

    • ielilloan hour ago
      usually you would go through seed funding, the series a,b, and possibly a1 and b1. If you entered c or d territory it meant that you still had a chance but vc would be following you very closely. After d, you could raise money, but it would be under very unfavorable conditions
    • winaan hour ago
      they can do as many as they want. but at some point investors need/want to exit their positions and push for an IPO. That point is different for every company.
    • rvzan hour ago
      Depends on the investors if they see growth. The downside is dilution. Preferably they just want the Series I as the IPO in this case.

      They cannot raise forever, SpaceX has done more rounds but the timing is most important.

    • re-thcan hour ago
      Yes, whatever you like
  • topherPedersen31 minutes ago
    Anthropic has a great product, but what's going on in the stock market is astonishing. Companies waiting to be valued at a trillion dollars before going public? (I'm writing this comment with the assumption that they will go public soon and the valuation will be higher than this $965 billion dollar private valuation) The stock market used to be a place for companies to raise money from investors. But that isn't what it is anymore, it's a dumping ground. Venture capitalists & private investors are sucking all of the possible growth and future upside from these companies and then dumping them on retail investors when there's nothing left. There is no growth or upside left by the time these companies go public. If you invest in these IPOs you are buying the absolute peak with all potential future profits baked into the price, with nowhere left to go but down.
    • taude26 minutes ago
      Yeup, no shortage of tech IPOs over the past five years that are now valued at like 5% of what they were after being dumped onto the market: ZoomInfo, Bumble, Gemini

      And many more that are 50% of what they were: Snowflake, Coinbase

      And many more that went back to private companies and then were sold off: Carbon Black, etc...

      I'm actually too lazy to go list out all of them.

      But employees, beware, of those gnarly lockup periods post IPO where all the better classed options than yours get to exit.

    • onlyrealcuzzo27 minutes ago
      > But that isn't what it is anymore, it's a dumping ground.

      We got "dumped" Google and Facebook, so... Those probably made up for all the other "dumps".

      We also got "dumped" TSLA, which is meme-ing in the trillions at the moment.

      You can short Anthropic at IPO if you want...

    • qeternity22 minutes ago
      > Venture capitalists & private investors are sucking all of the possible growth and future upside from these companies and then dumping them on retail investors when there's nothing left.

      A lot of the money that is deployed by VCs comes from pension funds and asset managers that ultimately manage money for the average Joe.

  • iooian hour ago
    So close to being the first kilocorn. A unicorn = 1 billion, this is almost 1k.
    • somepersonan hour ago
      Hasn't SpaceX achieved that though?

      And Saudi Aramco before they IPO'd

    • Jblx220 minutes ago
      Kibicorn has a nicer ring to it ($1,024 billion).
  • 8f2ab37a-ed6c40 minutes ago
    Say you join Anthropic now as an employee. What are the chances of your equity appreciating in value? I don't think we have any historical precedents to this.
    • bix615 minutes ago
      Well presumably nobody investing in this current round expects anything less than a 3x
    • hiddencost8 minutes ago
      inflation

      I suspect we'll have our first $10T company in the next 2-3 years. That's only doubling.

  • bix613 minutes ago
    This is all getting a bit tiring. Show us the S1 already!
  • mutator35 minutes ago
    This did round involve a secondary? If yes, any data to suggest that these secondaries are leading to increased spending outside of housing and propping up the local economy?
  • Liongaan hour ago
    Boys we got more subsidy for Claude Code Plans! Let the VC financed spending of 1000$ of datacenter cost for 200$ sales price continue!
  • whalesaladan hour ago
    They're going to run out of letters pretty soon.
    • gruezan hour ago
      Anyone in finance should know that excel doesn't run out of letters (for columns) either. It just rolls over to AA, AB, etc.
  • 4ashga42 minutes ago
    That announcement is a bit short on details. I suppose that, like in the previous rounds, there are some strings attached and they'll not get all of it at once.

    Hynix is participating with a new circular deal. Hynix is also valued at $1 trillion now, which is positively insane.

    This scam will implode harder that the housing bubble.

  • malthaus27 minutes ago
    nice, that's another 4 years of spacex data center usage runway!
  • heloquian hour ago
    [dead]
  • aanet39 minutes ago
    I'll have some of that joint they be smokin'

    /s

  • enraged_camelan hour ago
    Revenue up to $47B. Looking forward to the Ed Zitron hot take on this one! No doubt he will fling more baseless accusations of fraud and other nonsense.
    • vb-8448an hour ago
      Unless you have access to Anthropics book your claim is as baseless as Ed Zitron's ...
    • InsideOutSantaan hour ago
      *run-rate revenue

      Without more information, this number is impossible to interpret.

      • Analemma_an hour ago
        This has become a meme which is way out over its skis. Yes, run-rate is not the complete story, but "impossible to interpret" is way overstating the case.
    • Liongaan hour ago
      What do they then need another $65B for? To sell 200$ plans that cost them 1000$ to fullfill.

      I can have $47B in revenue if I sell something that cost $80B to produce ez pz.

      • Maxataran hour ago
        Revenue is not profit.
    • NewJazzan hour ago
      [flagged]
  • rvzan hour ago
    This is likely the last fund raise before going public.

    You can't spell Anthropic or OpenAI without "IPO". You can remove the "c" in anthropic, reverse it and the first 3 letters is "ipo".

    But you certainly can spell both of them without "AGI".

    Therefore, "AGI" is a complete scam and it actually was meant to be a giant IPO.

    • underyxan hour ago
      you also can't write openai without a pen
    • bensyversonan hour ago
      Airtight logic
      • goodbirb16 minutes ago
        Some new form of mystic numerology/gematria-based investment logic?
    • Imustaskforhelp43 minutes ago
      I think your conclusion might be right that AGI does just feel a bunch of hype but the reasoning in middle feels flawed...

      like how 13^2=169 and 31^2=961 or 10^2+11^2+12^2=13^2+14^2

    • moralestapiaan hour ago
      9k karma, whew