Amid increasing competition in the field of artificial intelligence, AI startup Anthropic is attracting growing attention from investors. According to sources, Anthropic's latest valuation has surpassed $100 billion, nearly doubling from $58 billion four months ago. This increase in valuation is mainly due to financial performance disclosed by Anthropic to certain investors, especially its annualized revenue that grew four times in the first half of 2023, exceeding $4 billion.
To support this growth, Anthropic completed a $3.5 billion equity financing in March and plans to raise a total of $5.5 billion this year. Although the entire AI industry is still making substantial investments, leading companies like Anthropic have demonstrated strong commercialization capabilities, drawing investor attention, especially in high-margin areas such as AI coding.
From the perspective of profitability, Anthropic's financial situation is relatively complex. The company achieves a gross margin of about 60% by directly selling its AI models and the Claude chatbot, with potential to reach 70% in the future. However, when selling through Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, the gross margin is negative at -30%. As of the end of 2023, 70% of the company's revenue came from direct sales, with an overall gross margin between 50% and 55%, showing no significant improvement.
As one of the successful applications of large language models, automated coding tasks have also brought substantial profits to Anthropic. Its coding assistant, Claude Code, has seen downloads grow sixfold per week since its full launch in May, reaching 3 million downloads. This product has become an important source of revenue for the company, contributing over $2 billion in annualized revenue. In addition, Anthropic's growth has indirectly driven the development of other startups, such as competitor Cursor, whose annual revenue has grown tenfold since last November.
Regarding cash consumption, Anthropic faces similar challenges as OpenAI. It is expected that Anthropic will consume $3 billion in cash this year, while OpenAI is expected to consume $6.8 billion. Although OpenAI's revenue is several times that of Anthropic, its cash consumption is less. Overall, the remarkable revenue growth of both companies has made investors optimistic, expecting them to exceed their targets set at the beginning of the year.
Key Points:
🌟 Anthropic's latest valuation exceeds $100 billion, with annual revenue growing four times to $4 billion.
💰 The company's gross margin reaches 60% in direct sales, but shows negative margins when selling through cloud platforms.
📈 The coding assistant Claude Code contributes over $2 billion in annualized revenue, becoming a key driver of the company's growth.
