Anthropic, a prominent generative AI startup co-founded by OpenAI veterans, has raised $450 million in a Series C funding round led by Spark Capital. The startup is looking to raise funding at a valuation of more than $4.1 billion. Investors included Google, Salesforce, Zoom, Sound Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and other unnamed VC firms. It appears to indicate a significant conviction in the potential of Anthropic’s technology. It employs AI to perform a wide range of conversational and text processing activities. “We are thrilled that these leading investors and technology companies are supporting Anthropic’s mission: AI research and products that put safety at the frontier,” CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement. “The systems we are building are being designed to provide reliable AI services that can positively impact businesses and consumers now and in the future.” Zoom and Anthropic have announced a collaboration to develop customer-facing AI products focusing on dependability, efficiency, and safety. A Familiar Face Fraser Kelton, the former head of product at OpenAI, has also joined Spark Capital as a venture partner. Spark was an early Anthropic investment, but it has since increased its efforts to find early-stage AI firms, particularly in the generative AI field. “All of us at Spark are excited to partner with Dario and the entire Anthropic team on their mission to build reliable and honest AI systems,” Yasmin Razavi, a general partner at Spark Capital, said in a press release. “Anthropic has assembled a world-class technical team that is dedicated to building safe and capable AI systems. The overwhelmingly positive response to Anthropic’s products and research hints at AI’s broader potential for unlocking a new paradigm of flourishing in our societies.” Anthropic’s war chest is currently $1.45 billion, trailing OpenAI’s $11.3 billion. Adept has funded $415 million, while competitor Inflection AI has raised $225 million. Amodei, the former vice president of research at OpenAI, founded Anthropic as a public benefit organization in 2021. He brought with him other OpenAI personnel. He left OpenAI due to a dispute about the company’s growing commercial focus. Anthropic competes with OpenAI and other startups in text-generation and image-generation AI systems, but it has loftier goals. The next-generation algorithm replaces Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot. It can perform activities such as searching, summarizing, writing and coding, and answering queries. It is comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Claude But Anthropic...