Anthropic raises $2.5B in debt to finance growth investments – News

Large language model developer Anthropic PBC has secured $2.5 billion in debt financing, CNBC reported today.

The loan is structured as a revolving credit facility. Standard debt financing deals require the borrower to pay back the funds in a fixed number of installments. A revolving credit facility, in contrast, has no such requirement. Additionally, the borrower can draw down funds again after repaying the loan.

Anthropic’s revolving credit facility will run for five years. It’s underwritten by Morgan Stanley, Barclay, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Royal Bank of Canada and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. Several of those banks also backed a $4 billion revolving credit facility that OpenAI, Anthropic’s top rival, raised last year.

“This revolving credit facility provides Anthropic significant flexibility to support our continued exponential growth,” said Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao. 

The company previously raised $8 billion from Amazon.com Inc. in the form of convertible notes. A convertible note is a type of loan that can be turned into shares. Amazon turned a sizable portion of Anthropic investment into shares during the first quarter, which was reportedly one of the reasons its earnings per share surpassed analyst expectations.

In conjunction with the announcement of its revolving credit facility, Anthropic disclosed today that its annualized revenue topped $2 billion in the first quarter. That represents a year-over-year increase of more than 100%. In the same time frame, the number of customers that pay at least $100,000 for Anthropic’s AI models jumped eightfold.

The company regularly launches new products to maintain its sales growth.

Earlier this month, Anthropic updated the application programming interface that customers use to integrate its LLMs into their software. The company added a tool that allows its LLMs to search the web if the information requested by a user isn’t readily available. Pricing starts at $10 per 1,000 searches.

A few weeks earlier, Anthropic debuted a new Max plan for its Claude chatbot. It’s available in two editions priced at $100 and $200 per month, respectively. They offer usage caps up to 20 times higher than the most affordable paid Claude tier.

Anthropic’s largest competitors are experiencing rapid sales growth as well.

In March, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI expects to triple its revenue to $12.7 billion by the end of 2025. More recently, a source told Reuters that Cohere Inc. has doubled its annualized recurring revenue since the start of the year. The company reportedly makes most of its revenue from providing highly regulated organizations with customized AI models that they can run on their own infrastructure. 

Image: Anthropic