lose the market that matters

Anthropic has closed a financing round of 30,000 million dollars that doubles its valuation to 380,000 millionjust four months after being valued at 183,000 million. The operation is led by the Singapore sovereign fund GIC and Coatue, with participation from NVIDIA and Microsoft. Bang.

The company has already raised more than $57 billion since its founding in 2021. OpenAI continues to have the leadership in valuation with half a billion after its last round of 40 billion at the end of last year, but now it faces a threat that is growing faster than expected.

Between the lines. The numbers explain an uncomfortable paradox for OpenAI:

• ChatGPT processes 2.5 billion queries daily and takes the consumer market by storm…
• …but Anthropic controls 32% of the LLM business market according to Menlo Ventures, compared to 25% for OpenAI.
• And in programming, the distance is even greater: 42% versus 21%.

OpenAI has seen its enterprise share fall from 50% in 2023 to 25% todayjust when this segment is emerging as the most profitable and predictable. If the consumer chatbot doesn’t turn out to be the winning horse in this race, Sam Altman has a big problem.

The contrast. Sarah Friar, chief financial officer of OpenAI, acknowledged in Davos that they have gone from 70/30 consumer-business to 60/40, with the expectation of reaching 50/50 this year. The transcript of the interview CNBC Bring all the details.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, boasts of maintaining an 80/20 business-consumer ratio from the beginning. Anthropic reports recurring revenues of more than 14 billion, with growth multiplying tenfold annually for three years. And customers spending more than $100,000 annually have increased sevenfold in 12 months.

Yes, but. Neither of them is profitable yet:

1. Anthropic projected gross margins of 40% by 2025, but lowered his expectations by 10 points due to inference costs 23% higher than expected. The servers rented from Google and Amazon weigh more than calculated.
2. OpenAI faces the same problem as both turn to the market every few months to fund the next phase. That is why both are considering IPOs between this year and next.

Unexpected twist. The launch of Claude Code in December has accelerated enterprise adoption in a way that perhaps no one anticipated. The tool has not only doubled users in a month, but has consolidated the perception of Claude as “the serious option” for companies compared to ChatGPT.

If companies value something, even more than the end consumer, it is stability and predictability. And Anthropic has been able to capitalize on that demand.

Missing? Temporal context:

• By the time Apple reached a valuation of 380 billion, it had already been in existence for almost four decades. He sold Macs, he sold iPods, he sold iPads. It was already going for the iPhone 5s and its annual profit was 50 billion dollars.
• Anthropic reaches the same figure without being profitable, compressing decades of value creation into just a few quarters.

It is not necessarily wrong, especially with the recent good dynamics of Claude’s company, but it remains to be seen if these models can sustain those explosive revenues and convert them into profits before the market loses patience.

In Xataka |

Featured image | OpenAI, Anthropic