Sequoia Capital enters Anthropic sweepstakes during $25 billion funding round

Sequoia Capital is jumping into Anthropic for the first time, after ignoring it for years. The Silicon Valley firm is joining a massive fundraising round that could hit $25 billion.

This round would more than double the company’s value, taking it from $170 billion four months ago to $350 billion now. The money isn’t coming from just one place. This is a pile-on.

GIC, the wealth fund from Singapore, and Coatue, the U.S. investment firm, are each throwing in $1.5 billion. Microsoft and Nvidia are together pitching up to $15 billion.

Everyone else (the venture funds, institutional players) is adding $10 billion or more on top. The final number hasn’t been locked in yet. Anthropic is still deciding who gets in. But the deal is expected to close soon, according to the Financial Times.

Sequoia overhauls its leadership and bets on multiple rivals

Moving on, this isn’t how Sequoia used to do things. Roelof Botha, the guy running it before, didn’t want anything to do with Anthropic. He thought venture money was being thrown at the same overhyped companies. “Throwing more money into Silicon Valley doesn’t yield more great companies,” Roelof said last year.

But Roelof is out. He got replaced in November. Now Pat Grady and Alfred Lin are running the show. And their approach is different. Sequoia has already backed OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. Now it’s backing Anthropic too.

That’s rare. Venture firms usually pick one winner in a sector and stick with it. But the money flying around AI has broken that rule.

Someone involved in the deal said this round is so huge, it doesn’t even feel like venture investing anymore. Sequoia doesn’t seem worried about overlap. The same person said the firm owns a lot of both OpenAI and xAI, and thinks they’ll all go in different directions. That’s what’s driving this shift. It’s not about picking one winner. It’s about not missing out.

Sequoia’s track record is packed with Google, Apple, Airbnb, and Stripe, but this is the first time it’s entered a late-stage deal like this for Anthropic.

And Anthropic is making serious money now, with its revenue literally surging 10x to $10 billion in December after being worth only $1 billion exactly a year before that.

That kind of growth is rare, even in tech. The company is best known for its chatbot Claude, which is used across a lot of engineering workflows.

And there’s more coming. Anthropic has already hired the law firm Wilson Sonsini to start work on an IPO. It’s also talking to banks to set up the offering. The public listing could happen later this year if all goes to plan. This would put it on the same track as OpenAI and SpaceX, who are also getting ready to go public.

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