Anthropic Inc., the Alphabet Inc.-backed artificial intelligence startup, has raised $450 million in new funding.
Spark Capital led the round for the San Francisco company, Anthropic said in a post on its website Tuesday. Alphabet-owned Google LLC, Salesforce Ventures, Sound Ventures, Zoom Ventures, Menlo Ventures and others also invested in the company's Series C deal.
Anthropic plans to use its new cash in part to continue development of Claude, its AI-powered intelligent assistant.
"The funding will support our continued work developing helpful, harmless, and honest AI systems," it said in its post.
Co-founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, both former OpenAI employees, Anthropic describes itself as an AI safety and research organization attempting to "build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems." In March, the company launched Claude, its AI competitor to ChatGPT. Claude is not yet open to public use.
Anthropic also announced that Yasmin Razavi, a general partner at San Francisco-based Spark Capital, joined its board of directors.
"The overwhelmingly positive response to Anthropic's products and research hints at AI's broader potential for unlocking a new paradigm of flourishing in our society," Razavi said in the blog post.
Anthropic's latest funding round pushed its valuation to $4 billion, Reuters reported, citing data from the venture capital research site PitchBook Data.
