After basking in the success of Google’s recent investment in Anthropic, the AI safety and research startup is raising another $300 million round at a pre-investment valuation of $4.1 billion, with Spark Capital leading the round.
Joining the likes of Google, Microsoft, and You.com, privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo announced the debut of its AI assistant service, DuckAssist, which is built on the Davinci LLM from OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude.
Legal tech startup Robin AI and Quora’s chatbot app Poe also use Anthropic models.
Anthropic had recently introduced a waitlist for early access to its AI assistant Claude, following Google’s recent investment in the company.
The investment—worth around $300 to $400 million—gives Google a 10% stake in the company and can value Anthropic at approximately $5 billion. The collaboration between the two companies has been hinted at, as Anthropic announced in January that it had chosen Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider. Till now, Anthropic has raised $580 million in Series B, led by Sam Bankman-Fried, chief executive at FTX. Caroline Ellison, Jim McClave, Nishad Singh, Jaan Tallinn, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research (CERR) have participated in the funding round.
The VC firm Spark Capital was founded by Paul Conway, Santo Politi, and Todd Dagres in 2005 and has made substantial investments in top tech firms like Twitter, Discord, Slack among others.
