Three months ago, OpenAI’s rival startup Anthropic, which is backed by tech giants including Amazon and Google, projected an annual revenue of $500 million by the end of 2024. This figure of projected revenue has now surged to $850 million, according to sources available to The Information.
Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI chatbot, was only making an annual revenue of around $100 million in 2023. It remains unclear how or why the predictions for 2024 are significantly higher now.
The AI startup was founded only three years ago and its ambitious growth projections highlight how far the generative AI industry has come within such a short span of time. Around a month ago, Anthropic launched a major update to its Claude AI model called Claude 2.1 with much larger context window, lesser amount of hallucinations, and API Tool Use.
Needless to say, Claude is an answer to OpenAI’s highly popular ChatGPT. In fact, Anthropic is founded by former senior members at OpenAI, siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei, the latter of whom served as OpenAI’s Vice President of Research.
According to The Information, there are individuals closely associated with Anthropic who speculate that the company might achieve an annualized revenue of $1 billion in the upcoming year, which translates to a monthly revenue of $83 million.
Additionally, as reported by Reuters last week, the company is currently engaged in discussions regarding a funding round aiming to secure $750 million, with Menlo Ventures leading the investment.
Over the past few months, both Google and Amazon have committed investments of up to $2 billion and $4 billion, respectively, in Anthropic.
Before this recent funding announcement, Anthropic had secured significant investments in its growth journey. In March, it raised $300 million from Google, and then in May, a Series C round of $450 million was led by Spark Capital. In June, Sapphire Ventures LLC committed a substantial $1 billion to the startup, and in August, South Korean telecommunications firm SK Telecom Co. Ltd. pledged a $100 million investment.
The current revenue projection reinforces the faith that these investors have shown in Anthropic’s growth prospects and serves as additional evidence of the accelerating adoption of generative AI within the enterprise sector.
