• by Laurie Sullivan , 2 hours ago

Sequoia Capital -- an early investor in Google, Apple, Airbnb and Stripe and other Anthropic major rivals like OpenAI -- now is lining up a major investment in Anthropic, as part of a first-time funding round set to raise tens of billions of dollars.

A funding round has been created by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and U.S. investor Coatue, which are contributing $1.5 billion each. California venture capital group Sequoia joined in, according to Financial Times, citing multiple people with direct knowledge of the deal. 

Anthropic wants to raise $25 billion or more in a deal that would value the company at $350 billion -- more than doubling its $170 billion valuation four months ago.

Tech groups Microsoft and Nvidia have committed to a combined investment of up to $15 billion in the company, with venture capitalists and other investors contributing another $10 billion or more, they added.  

Global AI funding reached $225.8 billion in 2025, with deals worth $100 million or more, making up 79% of total funding, CB Insights. AI funding skyrocketed, but deal activity fell in Q4 2025 from Q2 2025, which is when deal activity peaked at 1,937 deals.

There is some uncertainty around Sequoia's funding, but growth of this platform could eventually mean another ad platform that advertisers can use.

FT reports that managing partner of Sequoia Roelof Botha had previously passed on funding rounds for Anthropic. Botha was wary of the concentration of VC investment into a handful of highly valued start-ups.

Anthropic launched Cowork as an exclusive feature for its Max subscribers. In an effort to gain users, Anthropic opened Claude Cowork, the company's AI assistant that performs tasks on computers, which became available to anyone with a per-month Pro subscription. It has an ability as an agent to work on its own, given access to files on a person's computer.

Malte Ubl, chief technology officer at Vercel, which helps develop and host websites and apps for users of Claude Code, told The Wall Street Journal that he used the tool to complete a complex project in one week that would have taken him about a year without AI. Ubl spent 10 hours a day on his vacation building new software and said each run gave him an endorphin rush akin to playing a Vegas slot machine.

Users of Cowork described to the WSJ "a feeling of awe followed by sadness at the realization that the program could easily replicate expertise they had built up over an entire career."

In early September, Anthropic announced that it last raised $13 billion in a Series F round that valued the company at $183 billion.

The company is gearing up for an IPO that could come as soon as this year. It's been sited hiring the law firm Wilson Sonsini to begin work, and is known to have held preliminary conversations with banks.