Anthropic Days Away From Concluding $20 Billion Funding Round

The round could close in the next few days and would value the artificial intelligence (AI) startup at $350 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday (Feb. 6), citing sources familiar with the matter.

The funding would almost double Anthropic’s previous valuation and comes just five months after the firm raised $13 billion. The report characterizes this as an indicator of investor enthusiasm driven by Anthropic’s revenue run rate, which surpassed $9 billion last summer.

PYMNTS has contacted Anthropic for comment but has not yet gotten a response.

As the report noted, last week was a momentous one for Anthropic, with the company introducing Claude Opus 4.6, a new version of its flagship AI intelligence model designed for enterprise and knowledge work.

The model is built around three outcomes that Anthropic views as critical for enterprise use, including finding information, analyzing it and producing finished outputs. The company says Claude Opus 4.6 is designed to execute those steps end-to-end, generating documents, spreadsheets and presentations with fewer revisions and outputs nearer to production-ready quality on the first attempt.

The release led to a multibillion-dollar selloff across the software and financial services industry, the Bloomberg report pointed out, adding that Anthropic’s coding agents that can write software with minimal human input have in the last year become popular with companies and developers.

Also last week, Anthropic competitor OpenAI announced it had begun offering both a platform and the services of human engineers to help enterprises use AI agents. The company’s Frontier platform helps enterprises build, deploy and manage AI agents. 

The human engineers, OpenAI Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), work in tandem with enterprises’ teams to create best practices for building and running agents in production.

These products are launching at a time when the “growth of enterprise AI is emerging at a key juncture in the enterprise software landscape,” as PYMNTS wrote last week. 

After “years of software lockups across inflexible and monolithic solutions,” corporate clients are increasingly seeking more from their B2B vendors as they realize more is possible.

It’s an especially consequential moment for B2B payments, that report added. They are repetitive, data-rich and historically manual, exactly the sort of environment where AI should flourish, but also unforgiving when it comes to workflow failures and downtime.

“The challenge for C-suite leaders is distinguishing between artificial intelligence applications that genuinely improve decision quality and resilience, and those that simply accelerate existing inefficiencies or may prove ultimately to be too fragile for the security-critical heavy-lifting many enterprise systems perform,” PYMNTS wrote.

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