Anthropic has announced a joint venture aimed at rolling out enterprise AI services with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs as founding partners, backed by a consortium of VCs, hedge funds and private equity firms including Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green and Sequoia Capital.
‎‎Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman each contributed $300 million to the $1.5 billion project.
‎‎The announcement coincides with Anthropic’s main competitor getting ready to take a similar action.
‎‎Similarly, Bloomberg revealed just hours prior to the Anthropic announcement that OpenAI was raising capital for a new business dubbed The ‘Development Company’.
With a $10 billion value and $4 billion raised from 19 investors, OpenAI’s initiative would function on a greater scale. TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent and Bain Capital are among the named investors; there does not seem to be any financial overlap between the OpenAI initiative and Anthropic’s rival.
‎‎Raising capital from alternative asset managers to establish new avenues for enterprise AI transactions is the general idea behind both endeavours. While the investors will profit more from any contracts that arise, the ventures will likely have preferred sales access to the companies in their investors’ portfolio.
‎‎Additionally, by adopting the forward-deployed engineer (FDE) approach made popular by Palantir, the additional funding will enable more engineering resources to be allocated to each individual.
‎‎”An engagement might start with the company’s engineering team sitting down with clinicians and IT staff to build tools that fit into the workflows that staff already use,” Anthropic stated in its statement. These kinds of engagements will occur in mid-sized businesses in a variety of industries, each shaped by the individuals closest to the task.
‎‎The two AI labs are circling potential initial public offerings (IPOs) while fundraising at a rapid pace.
‎‎At the end of March, OpenAI announced $122 billion in new fundraising, despite its $852 billion valuation; Anthropic is nearing the end of its own investment round, looking to raise $50 billion against a $900 billion value.
