Both Anthropic and OpenAI announced joint ventures with well-funded firms, aimed at marketing AI to enterprises.
Despite the billions in investment required, building AI seems to be going more smoothly than selling it. Both Anthropic and OpenAI hope to solve this with a new approach. Both parties are teaming up with partners and launching joint ventures to sell AI more effectively.
They are doing this simultaneously, but independently and with different partners. Anthropic is building its joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs. Other capital funds are also throwing their weight behind the project. Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman are each already pumping 300 million into the new company, which is valued at 1.5 billion dollars at its launch.
OpenAI has convinced nineteen investors to pump a total of four billion dollars into a joint venture already valued at ten billion dollars. Bain Capital, TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, and Advent are the big names here. It does not appear that any capital fund has bet on both horses.
The Deployment Company
OpenAI already has a name for its joint venture: The Deployment Company. That name immediately summarizes the objective perfectly. The companies want to use funds from alternative sources to develop new channels for bringing AI to enterprises. Investors, in turn, will be able to extract value from contracts more quickly.
The two parties are opting for a strategy using so-called forward-deployed engineers. In this model, engineers join their customers’ teams as a kind of consultant, helping to immediately integrate solutions tailored to what customers actually need. They are taking a leaf out of the book of the highly controversial Palantir, which also uses such an approach.
Growing revenue
Anthropic and OpenAI are considering an IPO and are constantly seeking new investments. This is necessary to build new infrastructure at a high pace to develop increasingly powerful LLMs. Despite the immense investments in AI infrastructure and the extreme valuations of both companies ($150 billion for OpenAI and $40 billion for Anthropic), they have not yet made a cent in profit, meaning investment money must continue to flow in.
The more enterprises use AI, the more accurate those high valuations seem. After all, the AI companies have exponential revenue growth in mind, with massive profits planned for the future. The joint ventures are a path toward that goal.