Anthropic has been valued at over $100 billion with 4x revenue growth and gross margins over 60%!

in the wake of Anthropic The company, which has seen a surge in sales of artificial intelligence products, told investors that some of its profit-related metrics are improving despite consuming a lot of cash.

That financial performance has prompted some investors to express interest in investing in Anthropic at a valuation of more than $100 billion if the company decides to move forward with a financing deal - a significant increase from the $58 billion financing valuation announced four months ago, according to two people involved in the discussions.

The company just closed a $3.5 billion equity round in March, but had previously told some investors that it planned to raise a total of $5.5 billion this year, and recently disclosed some of its financial performance to some investors. In other good news, Anthropic has rehired two former heads of its programming products division, who joined rival Anysphere, which runs the Cursor programming app, just two weeks ago.

- Anthropic's operations are not as efficient as OpenAI's, but revenue is growing rapidly. Gross margin of 60% (target 70%) in self-owned channels, but -30% in cloud partner channels (due to Amazon/Google split)

• Anthropic 年化收入超40亿美元（半年增长4倍），核心驱动力为编程产品Claude Code贡献超2亿美元年化收入

Anthropic recently told investors that it earns gross margins of about 60% from selling AI models and the Claude chatbot directly to customers and is on track to reach 70%, according to two people with knowledge of the financials.

Margin figures typically refer to gross profit as a percentage of revenue, calculated after subtracting the cost of servers and customer support needed to support the company's revenue-generating products. Those gross margins fluctuate with how efficiently the company plans and uses its computing resources, including the artificial intelligence chips that power its technology, people familiar with the matter said.

However, the 60% gross margin doesn't tell the whole story. Anthropic also sells Claude models through Amazon CloudTech and Google Cloud, a business that earlier this year had a negative gross margin of 30%, people familiar with the matter said.That's likely because Amazon and Google, both of which have invested billions of dollars in Anthropic, take a sizable cut of Anthropic's model sales to cloud customers .

Sales generated through cloud service providers are likely to account for only a small portion of Anthropic's revenue. As of the end of 2024, approximately 70% of Anthropic's revenue will come from direct sales rather than the cloud provider channel, although the company has previously predicted that revenues generated from sales of its models to enterprises will come primarily from cloud providers in the coming years.

It is unclear what percentage of Anthropic's revenue comes from direct sales, but the latest disclosures suggest that Anthropic's overall gross margin may not have improved since the end of 2023, when it ranged between 50% and 55%.

In contrast, OpenAI earlier this year forecast gross margins of 481 TP4T in 2025. openAI expects steady improvement over the next few years, culminating in gross margins of 701 TP4T by 2029. It's unclear whether the two companies calculate their margins in the same way.

Of course, Anthropic's and OpenAI's gross margins don't reflect the billions of dollars they invest annually in developing AI and paying salaries and other operating expenses, all of which are higher than traditional software companies.

Overall, OpenAI has been operating more efficiently than Anthropic, and according to financial disclosures, OpenAI has been significantly less cash-intensive, even though its revenues are several times those of Anthropic. During the first quarter of this year's fundraising process, Anthropic told investors that it will burn through $3 billion this year after consuming $5.6 billion last year, and expects revenues to grow rapidly to as much as $12 billion by 2026 on the back of its market-leading AI technology in coding-related tasks.

Earlier this year, OpenAI was projected to consume about $6.8 billion in funding this year and $7.6 billion next year, with revenue projections of $13 billion and $29 billion, respectively, for the same period. Similar to Anthropic, OpenAI's explosive growth stems in part from software engineers using its products for coding tasks.

Despite the high cost of developing AI models, investors in companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are somewhat encouraged by the fact that they are able to consistently run models at lower costs as algorithms improve and AI chips are used more efficiently.

But today, investors are more excited about their exploding revenues. Both companies look set to easily beat their optimistic revenue expectations for the year.

Anthropic quadrupled its first-half revenue to more than $4 billion annualized (multiply last month's revenue by 12). Its Claude chatbot now includes Claude Code, a programming assistant powered by Anthropic's models, which the company says has grown rapidly since it became fully available to customers in May.

For example, the company told some investors that weekly downloads of Claude Code have increased six-fold since June to 3 million. The company also informed investors that Claude Code contributes more than $200 million in annualized revenue (i.e., more than $16.7 million per month), and that users can use the product through the Claude chatbot subscription service or Anthropic's application programming interface (API).

A valuation of at least $100 billion means some investors are willing to give Anthropic a valuation multiple of at least 25 times forward-looking revenue. By comparison, OpenAI had discussed an equity financing with investor SoftBank in January of this year, which at a valuation of $260 billion before the new money was injected was about 43 times forward-looking revenue at the time. Since then, OpenAI's annualized revenue has climbed from about $6 billion to more than $10 billion.

Part of Anthropic's growth has been fueled by its role as a catalyst for other emerging AI startups. Cursor, one of Claude Code's main competitors, had annualized revenues of $500 million as of June, a 10-fold increase from November of last year, and Cursor's AI capabilities rely heavily on Anthropic's models, so the growth in its revenues has benefited Anthropic as well.

Automating coding tasks, such as debugging or developing new features, is arguably the most successful commercial application of large-scale language models.

Companies in the field have introduced programming agents that can handle complex coding tasks for long periods of time. Researchers at a number of companies, including OpenAI, believe that automated programming is a key step in developing AI to take on much of the world's economically valuable work because it automates the work of AI researchers and engineers at scale .

References:https://www.theinformation.com/articles/investors-float-deal-valuing-anthropic-100-billion