Anthropic announced on Monday, May 4, that it is forming an enterprise AI services company with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs as founding partners. Anthropic said the company will help mid-sized businesses bring Claude into core operations, with its applied AI engineers working alongside the new firm’s engineering team.
Anthropic named General Atlantic, Leonard Green, Apollo Global Management, GIC and Sequoia Capital as additional backers. The venture was reported to have a $1.5 billion valuation, with commitments of $300 million each from Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman.
OpenAI was separately reported on May 4 to be raising $4 billion from 19 investors for an enterprise AI services venture called The Deployment Company. The report put its valuation at $10 billion and named TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent and Bain Capital among the investors.
Engineers working with business customers
Anthropic said engagements will begin with small teams working closely with customers to identify where Claude could fit into their operations. The new firm’s engineers, alongside Anthropic’s applied AI staff, will develop custom systems and provide ongoing support.
The arrangement resembles the forward-deployed engineer model associated with Palantir, in which technical teams work directly with customers to adapt software to their operational needs.
In an illustrative healthcare engagement, Anthropic described engineers working with clinicians and IT staff to develop tools for documentation, medical coding, prior authorizations and compliance reviews. The example outlines potential work rather than results from a completed deployment.
The founding partners said the initial customer base will include companies in the investment firms’ portfolios and independent businesses. They described the new firm as a standalone company with Anthropic engineering and partnership resources embedded in its team.
Anthropic positioned the venture as an expansion of its delivery capacity for mid-sized companies alongside its existing consulting and systems integration relationships. The company said the new firm will join the Claude Partner Network, whose partners include Accenture, Deloitte and PwC.
Separate fundraising at the AI developers
The service ventures are distinct from fundraising for the AI developers themselves. At the end of March, OpenAI said it had closed a funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at an $852 billion post-money valuation.
An April 30 report citing sources familiar with the matter described a prospective Anthropic funding round of roughly $50 billion, targeting a valuation of about $900 billion. Anthropic declined to comment. Those figures described proposed financing rather than a completed round with final terms.
