Humanity, an artificial intelligence startup, said Monday it completed a new funding agreement that valued the company at $61.5 billion, from about $16 billion more than a year ago.
The new round, led by venture capital firm LightSpeed Venture Partners, will put another $3.5 billion in the company. Since its founding in 2021, Anthropic has raised over $14.8 billion from venture companies such as Menlo Ventures and tech giants such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce.
The deal comes amid a surge in fundraising activities for the industry's most notable AI startups. Openai is set to close a $40 billion funding transaction valued at $300 billion, with nearly double valuation from just five months ago. Elon Musk's Xai is discussing a new funding round that could be highly valued by $75 billion from about $40 billion just two months ago.
Openai launched an AI boom with the release of ChatGpt in late 2022, causing a surge in funding that moved billions to a wide range of startups. The enthusiasm of AI companies investors cooled down in 2024. Because some well-known startups were essentially folded to high-tech giants like Google and Amazon. However, companies like Openai and humanity have revived investor interest as chatbots called Claude continue to improve their AI technology.
(The New York Times sued Openai and its partner Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to AI Systems. Openai and Microsoft denied these claims.)
Mankind's CEO Dario Amody and his sister Daniela Amody, president of the company, Daniela Amody, have founded them as a startup building AI on guardrails. Like some of the other in the company's founding team, they had left Openai after disagreement with startup leadership about how the technology was funded and released through Microsoft.
In a 2023 podcast interview, Amodei said there is a 10-25% chance that AI technology could destroy humanity. However, in October he took a more optimistic tone to publish a 14,000-word essay on the potential benefits of AI technology.
“I think most people underestimate how radical the benefits of AI are, just like most people underestimate how bad the risk is,” he writes.
The following month, humanity raised $4 billion from its biggest investor, Amazon, and put a total of $8 billion in the startup. Build and operate AI systems using computer data centers owned by Amazon and Google.
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