Anthropic PBC, a rapidly gaining artificial intelligence startup, has revised its forecast, which was made just three months ago, and now projects that it will reach a $850 million annualized revenue run rate by the end of 2024.
The company informed investors back in September that it was turning a profit at an annualized run rate of $100 million and predicted that figure would reach $500 million by the end of the following year. The Information reported today that two individuals with knowledge of the company’s finances provided the updated estimate; however, the report did not explain why the new estimate is significantly higher than the previous one.
Anthropic is one of several well-known AI startups vying with OpenAI in the generative AI space, with support from Google LLC and Amazon.com Inc. The most well-known generative AI model is ChatGPT, which is well-known for producing responses to text and audio prompts that resemble those of a human.
Claude is Anthropic’s response to ChatGPT, and many believe it to be just as good. The most recent model from the company, called Claude 2, is meant to take on GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT’s most recent iteration. In addition to answering simple inquiries, it can create original software, solve math problems, and create marketing copy.
Dario and Daniela Amodei, siblings who had previously worked at OpenAI, founded the company. A primary distinction between Claude 2 and competing models is its capacity to handle increasingly intricate prompts with up to 100,000 tokens—an AI unit equivalent to characters and numbers. More tokens allow for the processing of more data.
GPT-4, on the other hand, can only handle 8,000 tokens. Anthropic contends that Claude 2 can therefore summarize lengthy documents far more effectively.
According to the Information report, some close to the company believe that by the end of 2024, its annualized revenue could reach as much as $1 billion, or $83 million in sales each month.
According to a report from The Information last week, Anthropic is reportedly in talks to raise an additional $750 million in funding, led by Menlo Ventures, on top of raising its own funds. Anthropic’s valuation is expected to reach a whopping $15 billion following the latest round.
The startup has already secured several billions of dollars in funding; in the last few months, Google and Amazon agreed to contribute $2 billion and $4 billion, respectively. It had previously raised $300 million from Google in an earlier round in March. In May, Spark Capital led a $450 million Series C round. In June, Sapphire Ventures LLC committed $1 billion to the startup, and in August, SK Telecom Co. Ltd., a South Korean telecommunications company, announced that it would invest $100 million.
The most recent revenue estimate offers more proof that generative AI is quickly gaining traction in business, seemingly justifying the investors’ faith in Anthropic’s growth forecasts.