Anthropic is the latest AI player to secure a massive sum of money to support its AI training business. The company has announced that the latest tranche in its Series E funding round has raised $3.5 billion from nine different investors.
According to a report from TheNextPlatform, Lightspeed Venture Partners was the lead investor, contributing $1 billion.
It is interesting to discover how difficult it is to find financial information about startups, and how vague companies can be about it. This is true even when using platforms such as Crunchbase, which uses AI to answer questions about startups.
All startups preparing for an IPO are terrified of being associated with a so-called down round, which raises less money than the previous round.
How much GPU computing power is Anthropic buying with that $3.5 billion?
A Microsoft Azure NDsr H100 v5 instance contains eight Nvidia Hopper H100 GPUs, eight 400 Gb/sec InfiniBand ports. And also two 48-core Sapphire Rapids Xeon 4 processors from Intel as hosts, with 2 TB of memory and 28 TB of storage. Narrowing this down to one GPU, a dozen CPU cores, 240 GB of RAM and 3.5 TB of flash storage puts you at a base unit of AI computing power. The on-demand price for a full Azure H100 instance is $98.32 per hour, which works out to $12.29 per hour for one GPU. $3.5 billion buys some 284.78 million GPU hours of H100 computing power.
Incidentally, Amazon Web Services charges the exact same rate of $98.32 per hour for a comparable p5.48xlarge instance with eight H100 GPUs, though AWS offers 800 Gb/sec network capacity and 30.7 TB of flash storage.
Five rounds of funding
In that light, it is interesting to analyze the amount of money Anthropic has raised so far, the company’s valuation, and the number of H100-equivalent GPU hours this is all worth.
Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook (now Meta), and Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype, were among the first investors in Anthropic and also led the Series A round in May 2021, which raised $124 million at a valuation of $550 million.
The Series B round in April 2022 raised $580 million and was led by the now-convicted Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison of the disgraced crypto trading platform FTX. The valuation then was $4 billion.
In May 2023, Spark Capital led a $450 million Series C round. Google also invested $2 billion in 2023 to acquire a 10% stake in Anthropic. In late 2023, Amazon invested $4 billion (paid out in two parts), bringing the valuation to $18.1 billion in early 2024.
In February 2024, Menlo Ventures led a Series D round of $750 million.
And now, in March 2025, Lightspeed led a $3.5 billion Series E funding, with contributions from Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures. In addition, Google took part in a separate $1 billion corporate round a few weeks ago and in a $884 million secondary market transaction in May 2025.
This means that Anthropic raised a total of $12.4 billion, which equates to 1.009 billion GPU hours in the public cloud.
After the Series E funding, Anthropic has a post-money valuation of $61.5 billion. Not bad for a company that had about $100 million in revenue in 2023, reached $1 billion in revenue by the end of 2024 and is growing at about 30% per year through 2025.