San Diego's Qualcomm and Intuit Ventures Invest in AI Startup Anthropic at $15B+ Valuation
San Diego's Qualcomm and Intuit Ventures Invest in AI Startup Anthropic at $15B+ Valuation
Corporate investors signals more tech giants are placing bigger bets on AI startups
Anthropic, one of the world’s hottest artificial intelligence startups based in San Francisco and backed by Amazon, Google — brings aboard Qualcomm and Intuit Ventures as its newest investors.
San Diego-based corporate investors Qualcomm and Intuit have piled into a $15 billion–valuation funding round for Anthropic, which develops large language models that compete with OpenAI.
The investment is part of a $750 million special purpose vehicle arranged by Menlo Ventures, which was announced on February 12th.
The new capital will be added to the billions of dollars in funding Amazon and Google have already committed to the startup.
It signals that technology giants are betting big on artificial intelligence startups, which need billions of dollars to train more advanced versions of their AI systems.
Founded in 2021, Anthropic is led by Dario and Daniela Amodei who started the company after quitting OpenAI due to a dispute on how to safely develop artificial intelligence. The 3-year-old startup raised over $750 million in funding and projects to hit $850 Million in annualized revenue in 2024, according to The Information.
Besides Anthropic, Qualcomm has invested in the AI startups Humane (valued at $850 million), Hugging Face, an open-source software service, and San Diego-based Wiliot, an data carrier platform startup. Intuit Ventures, which has offices in Carmel Valley, is also backer of San Diego-based Drata (valued at $2 billion).
Other backers include James McClave, Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Skype engineer Jaan Tallinn.