Lightspeed Announces Lead Investment in Anthropic’s 3.5B Series E Financing

Anthropic’s trajectory over the past three years has been remarkable. Founded in 2021 by a team of seven with a shared vision for building AI that’s both safer and more capable, Anthropic has rapidly pushed the boundaries of what artificial intelligence can achieve.

Lightspeed first engaged with Anthropic in early 2023, when the company had fewer than 100 employees, no public product, and was pre-revenue. In the two years since, Anthropic has launched industry-defining models, forged major partnerships with industry giants, and scaled at a striking rate.

Today, Lightspeed is deepening its commitment to this vision, by leading Anthropic’s $3.5 Billion Series E as the largest investor in the round. This round underscores our conviction in Anthropic and the essential role of foundation models as the bedrock of AI progress.

An Era-Defining Rise

True tipping points in technology are rare. Over the past few decades, we’ve seen software, internet, cloud, and mobile fundamentally change how companies operate and how people live their lives.

But while these shifts were transformative, they were mostly platform shifts. They enabled new experiences, but not fundamentally new technological capabilities. Software became much cheaper and scaled to every corner of our lives, but most disruptions did not feel like true tipping points. Mobile experiences, while more pervasive, are not fundamentally more powerful than desktop capabilities.

AI — intelligence as software — is a fundamentally different paradigm. We are witnessing the creation of novel capabilities that simply did not exist before, and they are transforming domain after domain.

Language models have started to disrupt content creation, coding, analysis, education, customer support, knowledge and database management, decision support, creative collaboration, and many more areas of human activity — all now available as a service.

Self-driving cars are rapidly scaling across cities worldwide.

Entire disciplines of research, including protein folding, materials science, and synthetic biology are starting to be transformed or disrupted, compressing hundreds of years of scientific discovery into mere months.

We see no evidence that this pace of innovation is slowing. In fact, we think it may be accelerating. Improvements in the architecture of algorithms, in reinforcement learning and in post-training are improving the core capabilities of AI models, while improvements in test-time compute and chain-of-thought reasoning are spawning a new generation of models that can reason their way through problems in real-time in much more systematic, human-like ways. This is leading to compounding, exponential improvements in AI’s capabilities at the frontier.

Anthropic’s rapid rise illustrates these trends well. When Lightspeed first engaged with the company in January 2023, it did not yet have a public product.

But in the two years since, Anthropic has:

• Launched four major generations of its flagship product, Claude, that have leapfrogged the state of the art in AI’s core capabilities — the most recent release of Claude 3.7 Sonnet is the industry’s first generally available hybrid-intelligence model with extended thinking capabilities.
• Announced major strategic partnerships with Google and AWS that surface those capabilities to millions of businesses, and introduced infrastructure tools that transform how AI integrates with business systems, accelerating AI’s rapid rate of adoption.
• Developed protocols and tools that give those AI models access to the data they need, and the ability to use computers like humans do to increase their effectiveness.
• Raised billions to accelerate their R&D and product deployments while expanding their international operations, building on existing global presence in the US, UK, and EU.

We believe the result is the non-linear scaling of intelligence-as-a-service.

Lightspeed has supported Anthropic throughout this journey, including investing in the Series D in early 2024. Our lead investment in Anthropic’s Series E now marks its next phase: a major advance in the next frontier of AI, and an acceleration of its adoption across the enterprise.

Where Anthropic — and AI — Are Headed

Frontier technologies are often marked by asymmetric advantages. Continuous log-linear progress in underlying technologies, like Moore’s Law, bandwidth, and storage, can lead to major tipping points that create new capabilities or new markets, like cloud computing.

Crossing these tipping points can confer asymmetric advantages. But unless the leaders maintain a laser focus on driving new innovations at the frontier of the capabilities they are building, those capabilities can rapidly become commoditized.

AI has the potential to create competitive imbalances that are orders of magnitude greater than traditional technology market advantages. The first reliable AI agents, for example, would represent a major tipping point in AI’s capabilities: the company that’s able to deploy and monetize these agents would not just gain incremental improvements over competitors but could redefine industries and create entirely new markets.

At Lightspeed, our core belief is that the biggest value from AI’s development will be unlocked at the frontier. Intelligence *is* the product and we are at the beginning stages of the journey. As a result, the most valuable applications are still being built — and the foundation models that underpin them are the essential and valuable substrate for that next wave. We estimate the evolution to the next wave of AI intelligence could power experiences and activities that represent $1.5 trillion in net-new revenue.

Anthropic understands this better than anyone. Led by the vision and determination of Dario Amodei and his outstanding co-founders, they have remained steadfast in advancing the frontiers of AI. Dario, who co-founded Anthropic after leading research and safety efforts at OpenAI, brings depth of experience in aligning AI capabilities with ethical frameworks and real-world impact.

The Anthropic team understands that both the trust people have in AI models and the complete ecosystem of technologies working in concert is what will build ultimate value in the market. Their products, including the recently launched Sonnet 3.7, are intelligence-dense, and their commitment to safety, interpretability, and scalability sets them apart in a crowded field. They recognize that trust is the foundation upon which all AI adoption is built — and that creating systems that are not only powerful but also reliable, interpretable, and aligned with human intentions is essential for enterprise adoption and societal adoption at scale.

With further funding, they are now focused on accelerating the next wave of AI capabilities — increasingly robust systems that can reason their way through real-time problems, and increasingly agentic systems that can perform work alongside or on behalf of their user as virtual collaborators.

These are huge opportunities — and will unlock the transformative capabilities we’re looking for. We believe they have the potential to revolutionize virtually every job or task that requires analysis, creativity, research, administration, problem-solving, creation, and much more. The bottlenecks being unlocked represent the availability of knowledge and intelligence labor itself as its market.

But capabilities alone won’t drive this change. Enterprises are major diffusers of innovation across the economy, and for them, performance isn’t enough. They don’t choose them on the basis of benchmarks. Businesses won’t incorporate AI into their processes unless performance is coupled with reliability at scale, interpretability, and security.

Enterprises need products and solutions — not just a model. With intelligence, what works — what can scale across business functions and throughout companies — is only what’s safe and reliable.

Anthropic’s clear focus on safety is both a differentiator and an advantage. The ultimate value to be unlocked with AI is rooted in the trust people have in the model.

That’s why, with our Series E investment, we’re betting on foundation models, the innovations they unlock — and we’re betting on Anthropic.

The content here should not be viewed as investment advice, nor does it constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. Certain statements herein are the opinions and beliefs of Lightspeed; other market participants could take different views.