The venture capital group is set to take part in a financing round led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and investment group Coatue, each of which is contributing $1.5 billion, the Financial Times (FT) reported Sunday (Jan. 18), citing sources familiar with the matter.
Those sources said Anthropic hopes to raise at least $25 billion in a deal that would value the artificial intelligence (AI) startup at $350 billion, more than double the $170 billion valuation the company achieved four months ago. PYMNTS has contacted both Anthropic and Sequoia for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.
Nvidia and Microsoft have also agreed to invest up to $15 billion in total to the round, with another $10 billion coming from venture capitalists (VCs) and other investors, the sources said.
The round is expected to close in the next few weeks, with Anthropic still determining which investors to admit, the sources told FT.
FT noted that Sequoia has also invested in OpenAI and xAI, a rarity in a world where VCs tend not to invest in competing startups. However, one source said the potential for financial opportunity in the AI space has changed that approach.
“This [Anthropic deal] is a round where the company is so big that it’s gone from a VC investment to a stock investment,” they said. “[Sequoia] own a ton of both OpenAI and xAI and are very bullish on the idea that this is not a race to be won, but that they will each have their own capabilities.”
PYMNTS wrote last week about the launch of the agentic Cowork experience for Anthropic’s Claude, allowing the chatbot to read files, organize folders, draft documents and carry out multistep tasks with user permission, instead of waiting for prompts typed into a chat box.
“Cowork’s launch reflects a broader trend in AI toward agentic models that are capable of planning and execution rather than just conversation,” the report said.
The shift is happening as consumers demonstrate greater comfort with giving AI tools access to complete tasks on their behalf. Research from the PYMNTS Intelligence report “How AI Becomes the Place Consumers Start Everything” shows that upwards of 60% of consumers in the United States used dedicated AI platforms such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity in the past year, a signal that AI is shifting to mainstream utility.
“For a growing share of users, AI has become a starting point for planning, learning and decision-making,” PYMNTS wrote.
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