A week into 2025, it’s clear that last year’s artificial intelligence (AI) startup boom isn’t slowing down.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently revealed that the organization would soon shift its focus to what he calls “superintelligence.”
More broadly, AI startups have helped drive a venture capital (VC) funding resurgence over the past year, receiving more than 46% of the funds handed out across Silicon Valley in 2024.
With AI enthusiasm still rising steadily, the year will likely bring some exciting new developments, as evidenced by the innovations unveiled this week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2025 by companies such as Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) .
Meanwhile, one of the tech sector’s most prominent AI startups seems to be on track to reach a major milestone that could significantly impact its growth this year. And no, it’s not OpenAI. Rather, it’s one of its chief competitors.
Leading AI startup has an important update
Before the launch of ChatGPT, several OpenAI staff members left the organization to launch their own public-benefit startup in 2021. This list included siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who now serve as President and CEO of Anthropic, an AI safety and research company based in San Francisco.
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Anthropic’s backers include some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, including Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOGL) .
But recently, Anthropic announced it has entered “advanced talks” to raise another $2 billion, which would increase its valuation to $60 billion. This comes just a few months after Anthropic successfully raised $6.6 billion in October 2024.
One year ago, Anthropic was valued at roughly $18 billion. If it can successfully reach the projected $60 billion mark, its value will more than triple in a year. This new valuation makes it one of the world’s most valuable privately held companies..
Anthropic focuses primarily on building “reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems,” This includes conducting research on AI safety and deploying models that are considered safe and beneficial to the general public. Its Claude AI model is seen as a leading competitor for chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini AI.
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According to reports, Claude is popular among tech professionals and often employed by businesses. Given Anthropic’s recent progress, it seems to have been effective at driving growth. Per the Wall Street Journal:
“The startup’s annualized revenue—an extrapolation of the next 12 months’ revenue based on recent sales—recently hit about $875 million, one of the knowledgeable people said. Most of that has come from sales to businesses.”
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The startup’s current funding round is being led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, a global VC firm that has backed many prominent tech companies, including leading fintech Affirm Holdings (AFRM) and network security firm Cato Networks.
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Anthropic isn’t the only AI startup that investors have poured money into over the past year. Elon Musk’s xAI concluded a Series C funding round in December 2024, announcing that it had raised $6 billion from backers such as Nvidia, AMD and Lightspeed.
SpaceX, Musk’s space exploration venture, skyrocketed to a $350 billion valuation in December 2024, an increase of 67 percent since June 2024. As TheStreet reports, this surge in value was sparked by a $1.25 billion private share buyback.
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Perplexity AI, a fast-growing search engine startup that is seen as a Google and OpenAI competitor, reported a $9 billion valuation in November 2024 after a $500 million funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners. In June 2024 the company was valued at $3 billion.
With Anthropic’s recent funding success, though, industry folks will likely ask one question: when it comes to AI startups, how high of a valuation is too high?
Industry expert Eric Newcomer has argued that OpenAI’s $157 billion valuation is likely not sustainable, citing examples of previously popular startups such as WeWork WEWKQ. The former unicorn soared to a $47 billion valuation in 2019 only to file for bankruptcy in 2023, an instance that highlighted the problem with valuing a new company too highly.
With enthusiasm for AI startups dominating Silicon Valley, it is currently unclear how high the valuations for both OpenAI and Anthropic can go and how high will ultimately be too high.
That said, the AI boom is projected to continue through 2025 and beyond. As long as it persists, a public-benefit company in the AI safety space like Anthropic will likely have plenty of work to do and plenty of room to grow.
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