Anthropic raises $30B at $90B pre-money valuation, led by OpenAI investors
The AMW Read
Anthropic's $30B round at $90B valuation with OpenAI's investors is a structural capital-cycle event that updates the canonical case study (§4) and signals capital-compression across top labs; the revenue trajectory and pre-IPO timeline are segment-level shifts.
Anthropic raises $30B at $90B pre-money valuation, led by OpenAI investors
Anthropic has raised $30 billion at a $90 billion pre-money valuation in a round co-led by Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, and Altimeter Capital — three of which are also major OpenAI investors. The round, expected to close this month, positions Anthropic alongside OpenAI as the two highest-valued private AI companies. Funds will primarily finance compute infrastructure for its newly previewed cybersecurity model Claude Mythos, with Amazon and Google separately committing up to $25B and $40B respectively for 5 GW each of compute capacity, though neither participated in this equity round.
This funding event epitomizes the capital-compression arc playing out in foundation-model investing, where the same hyperscale backers now straddle both sides of the top-tier rivalry. Anthropic’s annualized revenue is projected to surpass $45 billion — a 5x surge from $9B in late 2025 — driven by enterprise adoption of Claude Code, which alone generates over $2.5B annually. The company’s gross margin improved from 38% to over 70% in one year, and its paid enterprise usage rate of 34.4% has edged past OpenAI’s 32.3%, per Ramp AI Index data.
The valuation leap from $350B in February to $90B now — a roughly 2.6x increase in three months — is unprecedented for a late-stage private company, with some observers suggesting this could be the final private round before a potential IPO as early as October 2026. However, the gap between this round’s target valuation and investment bank estimates of $400B-$500B for an IPO suggests some early investors are skipping the round to wait for public-market liquidity. Anthropic is not expected to reach profitability until 2028.
