Anthropic is in the final stages of closing a funding round of more than $30 billion at a valuation above $900 billion, according to reporting first published by Bloomberg on 22 May and corroborated widely since. If it closes on the reported terms, the maker of Claude becomes the most valuable AI startup in the world.
Disclosure: RECATOOLS is written with the assistance of Claude, made by Anthropic, which is also named in this article. Readers should weigh that interest.
Who is writing the cheques
The round is co-led by Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Altimeter Capital, and Greenoaks Capital Partners, each putting in roughly $2 billion, with existing backers including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and General Catalyst also participating, per the Reuters report carried by Yahoo Finance. As of 23 May the commitments were described as still being finalised and the terms could still change — the usual caveat on a private round of this size until the wire actually clears.
Overtaking OpenAI — barely, and on paper
At more than $900 billion, Anthropic edges ahead of OpenAI, last valued at $852 billion in a $120 billion round completed in March. The symbolism is louder than the gap: for most of the modern AI era OpenAI has been the category's default leader by valuation. The two are now pursuing different financing paths — Anthropic raising private megarounds, while OpenAI filed a confidential S-1 with US regulators on 22 May, the opening move toward a public listing. One company is staying private and topping up; the other is heading for the public markets.
A valuation that doubled in a quarter
The most striking part of the story is the slope. Anthropic's marked valuation has moved faster in the last year than almost any company on record:
- $61.5B
Valuation after an early-2025 round.
- $183B
Series F.
- $380B
Series G — $30 billion raised, post-money.
- $900B+
Current round, set to close — a roughly 2.4× step in three months.
That is two $30 billion raises inside four months. A valuation moving from $380 billion to past $900 billion in a single quarter is the kind of repricing that, in any earlier cycle, would have taken a company several years and a public listing to achieve.
Why investors are paying up
The bull case is revenue growth that is, for once, roughly keeping pace with the valuation. Anthropic posted about $4.8 billion in first-quarter 2026 revenue and expects $10.9 billion for the second quarter — more than double — with the company guiding toward an annualised run rate above $50 billion by the end of June and, by its own account, its first profitable quarter. Those second-quarter and run-rate numbers are company guidance for a period that has not yet been reported; they are projections, not realised results, and independent confirmation will come with the actual filing.
Much of that demand is enterprise, and the company's coding product, Claude Code, has been one of the fastest-growing pieces — reportedly crossing a $1 billion annualised run rate within months of launch. Whether $50 billion in run-rate revenue justifies a $900 billion mark is the question every late-stage investor in this round is implicitly answering "yes" to.
What it signals
Two things. First, capital is concentrating at the very top of the AI market at a pace that is squeezing everyone in the middle: a single company absorbing $30 billion is most of a strong week's worth of global venture funding in one name. Second, the private-market AI cycle has not cooled the way the broader 2024–2025 venture slowdown suggested it might — it has bifurcated, with a handful of frontier labs commanding valuations that look more like sovereign assets than startups.
Correction, 18 October 2026: An earlier version said the round could make Anthropic the most valuable private company that is not a state oil major, and labelled the reported valuation as pre-money; neither is supported by the reporting, and both have been removed. An unsourced figure on the number of businesses spending more than $1 million a year with Anthropic has also been removed.
View author profile → · Editorial policy
