Anthropic closes $3.5 billion funding round, valued at $61.5 billion

Anthropic closed its latest round of funding on Monday at a post-investment valuation of $61.5 billion, according to CNBC. The $3.5 billion round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with other investors including Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Investments, Fidelity Management & Research Co. Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners and Jane Street, among others. Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, whose founder is a former OpenAI research director, is backed by Amazon. The company launched Claude in March 2023, and like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, Claude's popularity has exploded as organizations adopt generative AI chatbots in their sales, marketing and customer service functions.