$965B and Climbing: Anthropic Is Now the World's #1 AI Startup

Anthropic Reaches Near-Trillion Dollar Status as AI Investment Wave Shows No Signs of Slowing

A fresh $65 billion Series H funding round catapults Claude's maker past OpenAI in valuation, with Wall Street analysts warning of both extraordinary opportunity and bubble-era parallels.

A Record-Breaking Raise

In a dramatic shift that appears to have instantly changed the face of global AI investment, Anthropic has announced the close of a colossal $65B Series H round, sending its post-money valuation sky-high to $965B. The deal, confirmed today, makes the five-year-old company-the creators of the Claude family of AI models-the most valuable single AI startup globally, displacing years of first-mover status from OpenAI, which was last valued at some $852B early this year.

Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital co-led the round, with each investing in the range of $2B+. These were backed by a veritable army of institutional stalwarts including, among many others, Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, D.E. Shaw Ventures, DST Global, and Fidelity Management & Research. Notably, even chip makers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron were among the investors, showing the tight integration between hardware and the AI arms race. A separate $15B chunk of the round came from earlier, committed cloud hyperscaler investments-including $5B from Amazon alone.

Anthropic plans to use the proceeds for safety and interpretability research, growing its compute infrastructure to meet overwhelming demand for Claude, and expanding its product and partnership ecosystem.

Analyst Reaction: The "Tip of the Sphere"

Technology analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities quickly branded the funding development merely the start of the huge AI driven market upswing. Appearing on CNBC Friday, Ives claimed investors' enthusiasm about AI is still in its opening pages and its nearly-$1tn valuation demonstrates the direction of the wider technology market. Instead of focus on the company itself, Ives told investors where the companies selling the pick and shovels in the AI rush – such as data infrastructure companies Snowflake, Datadog, and InnoData was likely heading.

These companies are showing some powerful performance recently, and they demonstrate enterprise AI spending across all levels of the tech stack. Ives also reiterated his calls for the Nasdaq to finish at 30,000 by 2027, seeing a market in 1997 - an environment of "real tech revolution" rather than a speculative bubble before the dot-com burst.

The Three Pillars of a New Industrial Era

Ives regards Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI as the three cornerstones of what he calls the fourth industrial revolution, and all three companies now intend to go public in 2026. In a Thursday regulatory filing, SpaceX announced that it intends to go public, with reported intentions to seek an IPO valuation of $1.75tn when it lists on Nasdaq in June – potentially one of the biggest Wall Street IPOs ever around June 12th. OpenAI also intends to float before the end of the year.

Ives also raves about Anthropic's prospects, and states that its Claude models are currently the best on the market. If it proves true, then Anthropic will no doubt heap the pressure on OpenAI when it comes to IPO. Anthropic is predicted to report a profitable first quarter in its next earnings, the first time the company – which has not made a profit for any single year like its competitors - is expected to make one.

Not Everyone Is Convinced

Ives' bullish outlook is far from unanimous among analysts. "The concentration of the megadeals is historically a sign of a peak in the stock market," noted John Blank, chief equity strategist at Zacks Investment Research. "It's very much like what happened during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s," he told an investor conference, "where companies jump into the public market before they run out of time to do so."

Blank's comparison is not unfair. All three of the potential blue-chip IPOs - Anthropic, SpaceX, and OpenAI - currently run annual losses, and to many market observers, that conjures uncomfortable comparisons with days past, when the demand for shares outpaced commercial realities by wide margins.

What Comes Next

For Anthropic, there is the short-term issue of putting this massive new influx of cash to good use. On the same day it announced its funding, the company launched Claude Opus 4.8, the latest and most capable of its AI models. This model boasts increased agentic performance for task execution, superior coding skills and, most notably, increased focus on truthfulness and self-correction. Many interpreted the timely release of both a funding round and a flagship model release as a conscious move to build momentum going into its likely fall IPO.

But overarching all of this is the biggest question mark for the entire industry: can all these companies turn enormous valuations into similarly large profits? The answer to that question will determine not only the post-IPO story of Anthropic, but the success of the fourth industrial revolution which Ives and many others are betting big on.