Anthropic, a San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up, is close to raising roughly $300 million in new funding, two people with knowledge of the situation said, in the latest sign of feverish excitement for a new class of AI start-ups. The deal could value Anthropic at roughly $5 billion, though the terms were still being worked out and the valuation could change, one of the people said. The start-up, which was founded in 2021, previously raised $704 million, valuing it at $4 billion, according to PitchBook, which tracks private investment data.
…Even as funding for other start-ups has dried up, investors have chased deals in similar AI companies, signaling that the otherwise gloomy market for tech investing has at least one bright spot. Other funding deals in the works include Character.AI, which lets people talk to chatbots that impersonate celebrities. The start-up has held discussions about a large round of funding, according to 3 people with knowledge of the situation. Replika, another chatbot company, and You.com, which is rolling out similar technology into a new kind of search engine, said they, too, had received unsolicited interest from investors.
All specialize in generative AI The result of more than a decade of research inside companies like OpenAI, these technologies are poised to remake everything from online search engines like Google Search and Microsoft Bing to photo and graphics editors like Photoshop.