- Anthropic closed a $65 billion funding round led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital at a $965 billion valuation — more than double its previous value and the fastest valuation growth trajectory in venture-capital history, per PitchBook.
- The company is tracking toward $50 billion in annualized revenue next month, with Q1 annualized revenue growing 80-fold; Q2 revenue is expected to more than double to $10.9 billion, setting up Anthropic’s first-ever operating profit.
- Anthropic’s ascent was built on enterprise and coding automation — not consumer chatbots — with Claude Code going viral late last year and agentic software development becoming the primary growth engine that is now driving revenue at an eight-times-faster pace than the company had projected.
- Both Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to file for IPOs this year; OpenAI closed a $122 billion round earlier in 2026 — Silicon Valley’s largest-ever fundraise — and Anthropic’s $965 billion valuation now exceeds OpenAI’s latest implied value, marking a dramatic reversal from two years ago when OpenAI appeared to hold an insurmountable lead.
What Happened?
Anthropic closed a $65 billion funding round Thursday at a $965 billion valuation, surpassing OpenAI as the most valuable AI company in the world. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital — roughly half the capital OpenAI raised in its $122 billion round earlier this year. Anthropic’s annualized revenue is approaching $50 billion next month, having grown 80-fold in Q1 alone; Q2 revenue is expected to more than double to $10.9 billion, a rate that will push the company into operating profitability for the first time. The growth has come despite a computing crunch that caused service degradations — Anthropic subsequently struck a deal worth nearly $50 billion with SpaceX to access the Colossus data center. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to pursue IPOs this year, with SpaceX’s own market debut potentially as soon as June 12.
Why It Matters?
Two years ago, Anthropic was an also-ran. OpenAI had ChatGPT with hundreds of millions of users, a $122 billion funding round, and first-mover brand dominance. Anthropic’s bet — focus on enterprise, prioritize coding automation, and treat agentic software development as the bridge to more advanced AI — has now produced what may be the greatest valuation reversal in tech startup history. The $965 billion figure is particularly striking because it approaches the $1 trillion threshold with actual revenue and an imminent path to profitability, not speculative future projections. The Claude Code virality — developers adopting autonomous coding tools that generated outsized productivity gains — created the growth flywheel. For the broader AI industry, Anthropic’s trajectory validates the “enterprise-first” strategy and raises questions about whether OpenAI’s consumer-first approach will prove durable as the market matures.
What’s Next?
The IPO race is now the defining story. OpenAI is expected to file soon; Anthropic could follow as early as this year. Whoever prices first will set the reference point for AI company valuations in the public market — a moment that will be as significant for the tech sector as the Netscape IPO was for the internet era. Watch whether Anthropic’s first profitable quarter materializes on schedule in Q2, as that would transform the IPO narrative from “high-growth startup” to “high-growth profitable company” — a dramatically more attractive equity story. The computing constraint remains the key operational risk: Anthropic’s $50 billion SpaceX Colossus deal is large but finite, and if enterprise demand continues to outpace supply, growth could be capacity-constrained even as revenue accelerates.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
