On March 27th, 2024, Anthropic, a Prime Unicorn Index component, received an additional $2.75 billion in funding from Amazon, totaling Amazon’s investment in the AI startup to $4 billion and making this Amazon’s largest venture investment to date.
Anthropic has developed Claude, a generative AI chatbot designed to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company recently released Claude 3, which is available for use through Amazon Bedrock, Amazon’s fully managed service that makes foundation models (FMs) available through a single application programming interface (API). This partnership gives Anthropic access to AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, which will be used to build and train future models. Amazon maintains a minority stake in the company and will not have a board seat.
Anthropic has closed funding deals worth about $7.3 billion in the past year, and the deal with Amazon brings the company’s valuation to $18.1 billion, as measured by the Prime Unicorn Index. Other investors in Anthropic include Google, Spark Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and Sound Ventures.