Anthropic, America's third-favorite AI company (third best loser to OpenAI and Google), just closed a monster $3.5 billion funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Which means the fresh funding gives Anthropic a thicc $61.5 billion post-money valuation—officially putting Claude deep into Silicon Valley's "unicorns on 'roids" territory.

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In short, the new cash injection lets Anthropic turbocharge its global ambitions, ramping up compute power and aggressively chasing market share in Europe and Asia. "Claude Goes to Europe" does kinda sound like a straight-to-streaming Amazon Prime Original, but hey, at least it's not another Bond remake… for now.

What’s more is that Lightspeed brought along some deep-pocketed friends for the ride: Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Investments, Fidelity, General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners, and yes—Jane Street. Meaning, Claude is officially Wall Street-approved.

Alexa, play “Money” by Cardi B.

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Speaking of Alexa, Anthropic's AI tech is now the brains behind Amazon’s new Alexa+. However, while Anthropic proudly claims Claude "powers Alexa+ for millions of households," let's be honest—Alexa+ isn't exactly something you'd brag about at cocktail parties. But the partnership definitely makes sense. Especially since Amazon has been Anthropic's sugar daddy for a while now, splashing out a total of $8 billion in funding without even scoring a board seat. Bezos and Jassey clearly subscribe to the "no strings attached" school of sugar daddy-ing.

(Source: CNBC) 

For this reason, Anthropic continues to rely heavily on Amazon Web Services (AWS), using AWS's Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy Claude. Which is mainly how Anthropic has quickly made a name for itself since launching back in 2023. The best part? Is that revenue reportedly hit an annualized $1 billion last December—a 10x increase year-over-year. The bad part? Profitability which still remains to be seen.  

But, but, but… who cares if a company is actually money when Amazon is not only backing them, but they have a stacked client roster featuring startups like Cursor, Codeium, and Replit alongside industry giants Zoom, Snowflake, Pfizer, Thomson Reuters, and Novo Nordisk, to feed the $61.5 billion valuation? Apparently, it’s a no-brainer (both figuratively and literally). 

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Plus, all this funding means Anthropic can keep scaling up their compute resources, boost their research into mechanistic interpretability (big words for “figuring out WTF our AI is actually thinking”), and drive rapid expansion internationally.

So yeah, all this to say is that generative AI still has businesses drooling over chatbots. And with the generative AI market predicted to hit a trillion dollars within a decade, Anthropic’s new $3.5B war chest positions it nicely to battle OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta for global market share—all while making Amazon folks even richer in the process. 

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For now, keep an eye on Anthropic, and Amazon considering their stock price will continue to be impacted by the AI giants' rise. But still, until there’s a ROI number—it’s still a gamble whether investors like it or not. In the meantime, place your bets accordingly, friends. And as always, stay safe and stay frosty! Until next time… 

P.S. $1.4 million, $1.02 million, and $6.715 million—these aren’t lottery winnings or Miami real estate prices… they’re all insider transactions that have gone down in the last 48 hours while retail investors were busy panic-selling everything. Want to track these corporate fat cats in real-time so you can pretend you're also an executive with material nonpublic information? (Legally, of course.) Click here to join Stocks.News premium while you still can…

Stocks.News holds positions in Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta as mentioned in the article.