Yesterday Anthropic announced the creation of a joint company focused on bringing enterprise artificial intelligence services to market. The new venture’s founding partners will include Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs; it will be supported by a broad group of investors, including venture capital firms, hedge funds and private equity backers such as Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green and Sequoia Capital.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Anthropic-backed company is valued at $1.5 billion, and that figure includes $300 million contributions apiece from Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman.
OpenAI reported to be planning a similar vehicle
A few hours before Anthropic’s announcement, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI is raising capital for a new venture called The Development Company built on a very similar premise. The OpenAI plan appears larger in scale: the report says it would gather $4 billion from 19 investors at a $10 billion valuation. Reported investors include TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent and Bain Capital. There appears to be no investor overlap between the two initiatives.
The rationale and operating model
Both efforts rest on the same basic logic: attract capital from alternative asset managers and other institutional investors to create new distribution channels for enterprise AI deals. The joint companies are expected to receive preferred sales access to the portfolios of their investor partners, while the investors would capture a larger share of the value generated by those business relationships.
The fresh capital also enables funding for more engineering resources dedicated to individual clients, following a model of deploying engineers directly to customer sites (the “forward-deployed engineer” or FDE approach popularized by Palantir). As Anthropic explained in its announcement: “A collaboration might begin, for example, with a company’s engineering team sitting down with experts and IT staff to build tools that fit into existing workflows… These collaborations will span midmarket companies across industries and will always be shaped by the needs of the people doing the work.”
Timing: large financings and valuations
The new ventures arrive amid a period of aggressive fundraising and potential IPO considerations for both AI firms. OpenAI in late March announced $122 billion of new financing at an $852 billion valuation. TechCrunch reported last week that Anthropic is in the final stage of a financing round aiming to raise $50 billion at a $900 billion valuation.
Both moves suggest major AI companies are pressing to monetize enterprise demand directly through institutional partnerships, while giving investors structured access to the commercial value of deployed AI solutions.
