Anthropic Raises $13 Billion, Valuation Soars to $183 Billion, Becomes World's Fourth Largest Unicorn

Early this morning, big model unicornsAnthropicAnnouncing the completion ofUS$13 billion (equivalent to about 92.8 billion yuan)F-wheelfinancing, the post-investment valuation reached $183 billion (equivalent to about 1.3 trillion yuan), about nearly three times the $61.5 billion (equivalent to about 439.1 billion yuan) valuation in March this year.

After this round, Anthropic is valued at $183 billion (roughly Rs. 1.3 trillion), making it the fourth most valued unicorn in the world, behind SpaceX (~$350 billion), ByteDance (~$330 billion) and OpenAI (valued at $300 billion).

The Anthropic, which was co-founded by siblings Dario Amodei, former vice president of research at OpenAI, and Daniela Amodei, was also once considered one of OpenAI's strongest challengers.

In a blog post, Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao mentioned, "We are seeing exponential growth in demand across our customer base." At the beginning of 2025, Anthropic's annualized revenue reached $1 billion (equivalent to about $7.14 billion), and today, eight months later, annualized revenue has surpassedUS$5 billion (equivalent to about 35.7 billion yuan).

On a customer level, its blog reveals that Anthropic currently servesOver 300,000 corporate customersThe number of large customers has grown over the past yearNearly 7 timesAnd each large client means it can bring in more than $100,000 (equivalent to about 714,000 yuan) in annual revenue.

The main driver of its business growth today is Claude Code, the AI programming artifact that exploded onto the scene this year.Claude Code was converted from a research preview to an official public version in May of this year, and in three months usage has grown by more than 10 times, generatingOver $500 million (equivalent to about $3.6 billion) in annual revenue.

The round was co-led by venture capital firms ICONIQ, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Qatar Investment Authority, Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), and other sovereign funds. Its blog mentions that the new financing will be used to scale enterprise adoption, deepen security research, and support international expansion.

It's worth noting that Anthropic has previously completed nine rounds of financing totalingUS$ 30.04 billion (equivalent to about 214.5 billion yuan).

I. Revenue of over 500 million knives in 3 months.AI Programming Toolsannual growthmain strength of an army

In 2021, Dario Amodei, then OpenAI's former vice president of research, headed out to found Anthropic with an R&D team of more than a dozen people, including his sister Daniela Amodei.

Today the startup is OpenAI's strongest competitor.

In 2023, Anthropic released released the first version of the chatbot Claude, which has been updated to Claude 4.1 this August.

In Anthropic's official announcement blog, it was mentioned that the new model outperforms OpenAI o3 in intelligent body tool invocation and multilingual Q&A capabilities, with scores of 74.51 TP4T and 43.31 TP4T in intelligent body programming, which significantly outperforms OpenAI o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, but its visual reasoning and math capabilities are still a bit behind those of OpenAI o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro still has a gap.

Also in February, Anthropic launched its ownAI programming tool Claude Code, which was announced in May of this year as fully open and moving from a research preview to a full-fledged product, Anthropic's blog mentions that todayClaude Code has become the tool of choice for developers.

Claude Code now integrates its strongest model, Claude Opus 4.1, which is codebase-aware and has the ability to edit files and run commands directly in the user's development environment.

Since its public launch, Claude Code has grown over 10 times in usage in three months, generatingOver $500 million (equivalent to about $3.6 billion) in annual revenue.

Second, 9 rounds of financing totaling more than $30 billion, Google Amazon chasing investment

Since 2021, Anthropic has completed 8 financing rounds since 2021, raising a total of USD 17.04 billion (equivalent to approximately RMB 121.6 billion), and is currently in the process of completing its 9th financing round, with the specific financing rounds and amounts listed below:

May 2021: Series A financing in the amount ofUS$124 million (equivalent to about RMB 890 million), with major investors Dustin Moskovitz, Eric Schmidt, and Jaan Tallinn.

April 2022: Series B financing in the amount ofUS$580 million (equivalent to about 4.17 billion yuan), with FTX as the primary investor.

February 2023:US$300 million (equivalent to about RMB 2.1 billion), Google invested and became a strategic shareholder.

May 2023: Series C financing.Amount of $450 million (equivalent to about 3.23 billion yuan)Spark Capital led the investment, with participation from Google, Salesforce Ventures, Zoom and others.

September 2023: Amazon announces strategic partnership, initial investmentUS$1.25 billion (equivalent to about 8.98 billion yuan)and plans to invest a total of up toUS$4 billion (equivalent to about 28.72 billion yuan). Amazon then became its main cloud service provider.

October 2023: Google InvestmentUS$500 million (equivalent to about RMB 3.59 billion)and committed to additional futureUS$1.5 billion (equivalent to about 10.77 billion yuan).

February 2024, completedUS$750 million (equivalent to about 5.4 billion yuan)Series D financing led by Menlo Ventures.

March and May 2024, raised consecutively in the secondary marketUS$884 million (equivalent to about RMB 6.3 billion) and US$452 million (equivalent to about RMB 3.2 billion).

November 2024: AmountUS$4 billion (equivalent to about 28.72 billion yuan), the main investor is Amazon.

March 2025: series E financing in the amount ofUS$3.5 billion (equivalent to about 25 billion yuan), led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, was valued at $61.5 billion (roughly Rs. 439.1 billion) at the time.

Google, Amazon, Salesforceand other well-known technology companies are among its investors.

Third, high operating expenses are a hidden danger, investors are more interested in the soaring revenue

According to the revelation, Anthropic recently informed investors that its gross margins on direct sales of AI models and Claude chatbot products to customers were approximately60%, and is moving toward 70%. That gross margin figure typically refers to the percentage of profit after server costs and customer support expenses. Those gross margins fluctuate with how efficiently the company plans to use its computing resources, people familiar with the matter explained.

The people familiar with the matter added that earlier this year, Anthropic's gross margin on sales of Claude models through Amazon Cloud Services and Google Cloud was-30%Speculation is that the reason may be that Amazon and Google take a sizable cut in reselling Anthropic models to cloud customers.

butRevenue generated through cloud providers may represent only a minority of Anthropic's total revenue, with about 70% of its revenue coming from direct sales by the end of 2024. The exact percentage of direct sales revenue is not yet known, but the latest disclosures indicate that Anthropic's overall gross margins will likely remain at 50%-55%, the same as at the end of 2023.

As a comparison, OpenAI earlier this year forecasted gross margins of 481 TP4T in 2025 and expects them to steadily increase, reaching 701 TP4T by 2029. it is unclear whether the two companies' gross margin calculations are consistent.

Notably, neither Anthropic's nor OpenAI's gross margins reflect the billions of dollars it invests in AI R&D each year, as well as operating expenses such as labor, all of which are much higher than those of traditional software companies.

Although AI model development costs are high, because of algorithmic improvements and the efficiency of AI chip use, OpenAI and Anthropic show a downward trend in the cost of running the model, which makes investors feel a little relieved. However, investors are more concerned about the companies' impressive revenue growth, with both companies expected to significantly exceed the optimistic revenue targets set at the beginning of the year.

Conclusion: Capital concentrates on head startups in AI field

According to previous data from global consulting firm Crunchbase, around $40 billion (roughly Rs. 285.6 billion) of venture capital funding flowed into the AI space in the second quarter globally, with $5.5 billion (roughly Rs. 39.3 billion) raised by basic modeling companies.This new funding from Anthropic also illustrates that VCs are increasingly focusing their investments in already large startups that are adequately funded.

Meanwhile, in addition to previous venture capital firms and well-known tech giants, the company's financing has also been flooded with many national sovereign funds, which shows that investors recognize the value of this AI unicorn.

This article is from WeChat "Zhidxcom" (ID: zhidxcom)Author: Cecilia Cheng