AI startup Anthropic raises $450 million from Google and other investors

The AI startup announced a $450 million Series C round. Leading investors include Spark Capital, Google, Salesforce Ventures, Zoom Ventures and others.

The funds will be directed toward building ‘useful, safe and honest AI systems.’ Among them is the Claude chatbot, which handles a wide range of text-processing tasks.

As a result of the round, Spark Capital managing partner Yasmin Razavi will join Anthropic’s board of directors.

The firm is currently developing new features for Claude, including expanding the context window to 100,000 tokens. This will allow the chatbot to process entire books.

Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI staff Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei in 2021. They were among those who left the company amid internal disagreements, including on matters related to collaboration with Microsoft.

According to Crunchbase, in two years Anthropic has raised $1.4 billion, making it the second AI startup by total funds raised. In first place is OpenAI with $11.3 billion.

PitchBook valued the startup at $4 billion.

Earlier in February, Google invested $300 million in Anthropic.

In March, the company unveiled the Claude chatbot, which is set to compete with ChatGPT.

In May, the startup unveiled the “constitutions” for the responsible creation of AI algorithms.