| Over 300 organizations rely on The Information for exclusive insights into public and private companies, including in-depth analysis of the ways in which tech moves markets. Click here to contact our corporate and enterprise team to learn more. Welcome back! This year's torrid deal-making pace is definitely not taking a pause for summer. On Wednesday, I reported that OpenAI is months ahead of schedule in raising money for its $40 billion megaround. Investors are pouring in money at a moment when OpenAI is generating $12 billion in annualized revenue and hitting 700 million weekly active users for its ChatGPT products, including both consumers and business customers. Investors are also keen to invest in Anthropic, as the company seeks to close its round in a matter of weeks. The company initially sought to raise $3 billion, but due to investor interest, it may raise as much as $5 billion at a $170 billion valuation in a round led by Iconiq Capital, according to a person who has spoken to company executives. After securing the lead investor, the firm is prioritizing investors who could write large follow-on checks, according to the person. Investors have been impressed with the company's fast growth. For instance, Anthropic is nearing $5 billion in annualized revenue, according to a person with knowledge of the company's finances. That's up from $4 billion just earlier this month. It needs the capital to pay for running and training its Claude models. Earlier this year, it told investors it will burn $3 billion in 2025 after burning $5.6 billion last year. Selling access to its models to coding assistant startups is one of the big factors driving its revenue growth. Anthropic has roughly 42% of the $1.9 billion market for code generation, while OpenAI had 21% according to a report by Menlo Ventures, an early Anthropic investor. That market share includes coding tools, such as Cursor, that use Anthropic's models. In fact, when Anthropic hit $4 billion in annualized revenue earlier this month, about $1.2 billion of that revenue was coming from the Claude-developer's top two customers, according to another person. It's not clear who those customers are, but some investors think they are Cursor and Microsoft's GitHub Copilot. Even excluding Anthropic's largest two customers, the company's annualized revenue in early July would have increased 11 times from the same month a year ago, according to one of the people. Some of the $1 billion increase in Anthropic's revenue over the last month, to nearly $5 billion, is also coming from Anthropic's success with Claude Code. The coding assistant is generating nearly $400 million in annualized revenue, roughly doubling from just a few weeks ago, according to one of the people. Claude Code can be accessed as part of a Claude chatbot subscription or through Anthropic's application programming interface. Investors are also looking at the four-year-old company's gross margins, or gross profit as a percentage of revenue. Anthropic's gross margins have recently been about 60%, according to a person with knowledge of the financials. This includes direct sales of Claude to customers, as well through its partners Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. That's higher than OpenAI's roughly 40% gross margins last year and its projections of nearly 50% for this year, although the ChatGPT maker has told investors that it expects the figure to rise to nearly 70% in 2029. In both cases, the model makers are including the cost of running their AI models, known as inference costs, as well as other costs, which usually include payment processing fees. Anthropic has also told some investors that if it includes the cost of training models in its cost of revenue—as opposed to in R&D compute costs, where model makers like OpenAI account for them—it would be breaking even. Including training costs in cost of revenues is an unusual way of calculating gross margins, investors tell me, but it may give Anthropic an edge when talking about its business to investors. For instance, OpenAI's gross margin would be roughly negative 12% this year, if it included its roughly $7.5 billion in training costs under costs of revenue instead of operating expenses. Anthropic, on the other hand, can claim that the company brings in as much revenue as it costs to both train and run its product—a degree of efficiency that investors may be pleased by in this market. | 
0 comentários:
Postar um comentário