Reports say Anthropic is estimating an $850M annual revenue by the end of 2024
Sources close to Anthropic's finances claim that the company will reach $850 million in annualized revenue by the end of 2024. Previous reports placed the figure at $500 million. The motivations for the updated projection remain unclear, but the optimism behind them may be well-founded.
A report published by The Information started making waves after it revealed that two people with access to Anthropic's finances claimed the company was set to deliver $850 million in annualized revenue by the end of 2024. The company had previously estimated it would reach $500 million, a figure that came up while Anthropic was looking to raise an additional $2 billion in funding from Google and other investors. The sources provided no further clarification on why the new prediction is substantially higher. Some reports speculate that Sam Altman's departure from OpenAI may have contributed to the updated projection since more than 100 OpenAI customers contacted Anthropic over the weekend following Altman's firing, allegedly searching for an alternative, more reliable partner.
Amazon and Google are currently Anthropic's principal backers. The company has raised $4 billion and $2 billion from these tech giants. In addition to these investments, the company has completed previous funding rounds led by several other investors, including Spark Capital, Sapphire Ventures LLC, and SK Telecom Co. Ltd., a South Korean telecommunications firm. According to Crunchbase data, these are the most notable episodes of Anthropic's 9-round effort to raise $7.6 billion in funding since its creation.
With a pre-investment valuation of $15 billion, Anthropic is reportedly in talks to close a $750-million deal with Menlo Ventures, which could boost Anthropic's valuation to an impressive $18.4 billion. The startup, funded by OpenAI-alum siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, is best known for its direct competitor to GPT-4, Claude 2. Claude's main selling point against GPT-4 (and other rivals) is that Claude 2.1 can handle a context window of up to 200K tokens, compared to the 128K tokens accepted by GPT-4 Turbo. Previously (May 2023), Claude was able to handle 100K-token context windows, while GPT-4's extended version was capped at 32K tokens. The capability to process such sizeable contexts translates into the model's ability to deal with more complex prompts and an increased capacity to summarize lengthy documents. However, Anthropic's Claude still lags in reach, as the web-based chatbot version became available internationally about three months ago, well after many other popular chatbots.
