Issue #72: Claude Cracks $900B

Anthropic Is Eyeing a $900B Valuation and It Would Leapfrog OpenAI Overnight

If you needed proof that the AI funding market has left Planet Earth, here it is. Anthropic - the maker of Claude - is weighing a fresh funding round that would value the company at more than $900 billion, according to reporting from Bloomberg and TechCrunch. The company is said to be entertaining preemptive offers from investors for around $50 billion at valuations ranging between $850B and $900B, with a May board meeting expected to be the decision point. That would more than double its current $380B valuation from just two months ago, and it would surpass OpenAI's $852B post-money valuation from its February round.

What's driving this? Revenue, frankly. Anthropic disclosed that its annualized revenue run rate now exceeds $30 billion - a staggering jump from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. That's not a rounding error; it's a 3x move in revenue in under six months. Add in Amazon's commitment of up to $25 billion (with a total committed cap now north of $33 billion), Google's pledge of up to $40 billion, and a recently secured 5 gigawatts of compute capacity, and you have the infrastructure of a company that is genuinely competing for the title of most important technology company in the world.

The implications are significant beyond just a headline number. A $900B valuation would reshape how LPs price AI exposure in their portfolios and could pull forward valuations for every other frontier AI lab. It also signals that the market is no longer treating Anthropic as the safety-focused underdog to OpenAI - it's treating it as a peer, or better. The big question now is whether this round actually closes, and at what price. Either way, the ceiling on AI company valuations has effectively been removed.

Key Highlights

• Anthropic is considering a ~$50B funding round that would value it at over $900 billion

• Annualized revenue run rate now exceeds $30B, up from ~$9B at end of 2025

• Would surpass OpenAI's $852B valuation set just two months ago

• Amazon has committed up to $25B; Google pledged up to $40B

• Last round in February 2026 valued Anthropic at $380B - this would represent a 2.4x jump in under 90 days

• May board meeting is expected to be the decision point - no deal has been signed yet

Anthropic built its brand on safety-first AI development. Now it's also building the revenue numbers to match. Whether this round closes at $900B or lands slightly below, one thing is clear: the frontier AI race has become a financial arms race at a scale that would have seemed absurd just 18 months ago.

Sources: TechCrunch  |  Bloomberg  |  CNBC

Quick Bites

Here are some interesting quick news items from the tech world this week:

A $1.1B Seed Round. Yes, a Seed Round.

David Silver, the former lead of Google DeepMind's reinforcement learning team - and the researcher behind AlphaGo - emerged from stealth this week with Ineffable Intelligence, a superintelligence startup that raised a record-breaking $1.1 billion seed round at a $5.1 billion valuation. The round was co-led by Sequoia and Lightspeed, with Nvidia, Google, DST Global, Index, and the UK's Sovereign AI Fund also participating. The company's stated goal is to build a "superlearner" - an AI that discovers knowledge and skills entirely through reinforcement learning, without relying on human-generated training data. Silver has pledged to donate 100% of his personal proceeds from the company to charity via Founders Pledge, potentially billions of dollars. At this point, "seed stage" means something very different than it did five years ago.

Learn more.

SpaceX's S-1 Has the Most Unusual CEO Pay Package in IPO History

SpaceX filed its public S-1 this week ahead of a targeted June Nasdaq listing under the ticker SPCE, gunning for a valuation of up to $1.75 trillion. The filing would make it the largest IPO in US history by a significant margin. But the real headline is Elon Musk's compensation structure: his 200 million super-voting restricted shares vest only if SpaceX hits a $7.5 trillion market cap and establishes a permanent settlement of 1 million people on Mars. A second tranche worth 60 million shares is tied to operating 100 terawatts of compute capacity. His base salary remains $54,080 per year - unchanged since 2019. Whatever you think of Musk, this is a compensation structure designed to incentivize multi-generational thinking, not a quarterly earnings call.

Learn more.

Cerebras Is Going Public, and It Wants to Be the Anti-Nvidia

AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems filed its public S-1 on April 17, targeting a Nasdaq listing under "CBRS" at a $23 billion valuation. The company reported $510 million in 2025 revenue (up 76% year-over-year) and swung to profitability with $87.9 million in net income, following a $485 million loss the prior year. The company has a major commercial agreement with OpenAI for 750 MW of AI inference capacity and a term sheet with AWS to integrate its CS-3 chips into Amazon Bedrock. The catch: 86% of revenue is concentrated in two UAE-based entities, which investors will need to get comfortable with. Still, in a market starved for credible Nvidia alternatives, Cerebras arrives at the right moment with the numbers to back it up.

Learn more.

Big Tech Is Bleeding Its Best AI Talent - and VCs Are Thrilled

A new CNBC report confirms what the venture world has been whispering for months: top AI researchers and engineers are leaving Meta, Google, and OpenAI at an accelerating pace to start their own companies. In 2026, VCs have funneled $18.8 billion into AI startups founded since 2025 alone. Companies like Periodic Labs (former OpenAI/DeepMind staff, $300M raised) and Humans& (former Anthropic/xAI employees, $480M raised) illustrate the pattern. The reported reason isn't just money - researchers say large labs are deprioritizing exploratory work in areas like new architectures, interpretability, and vertical models in favor of scaling existing LLM approaches. For founders, the takeaway is that some of the best technical co-founder talent in a generation is becoming available - and capitalized.

Learn more.

Avoca Hits $1B Valuation by Answering the Phone for Plumbers

Avoca, an AI platform built for home services businesses (think HVAC, plumbing, roofing), raised $125 million across its Seed, Series A, and Series B to reach a $1 billion valuation. The Series B was led by Meritech and General Catalyst; Kleiner Perkins led the Series A. The company automates front-office operations - missed calls, scheduling, marketing follow-ups - for the tens of thousands of small service businesses that still run on spreadsheets and voicemail. Avoca surpassed eight figures in ARR in 2025 and is on track to book $1 billion in jobs this year for its customers. This is exactly the kind of vertical AI story that gets underwritten by massive TAM and low competitive pressure: no one else is doing serious software for the guy who fixes your furnace.

Learn more.

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Startup Warning

Bollinger Motors: How an EV Startup Went from $675M in Orders to a Forced Auction

Bollinger Motors, the electric truck startup that once had 675 million dollars worth of pre-orders and a credible path to disrupting the commercial EV market, is now auctioning off its last 20 trucks and 427 lots of manufacturing equipment. A Lucas County court ordered the liquidation following a lawsuit from supplier Dana Inc., which claimed Bollinger owed it $6.2 million in unpaid bills. The Michigan Economic Development Corp is simultaneously seeking repayment of roughly $1 million of a $3 million state grant, and the Department of Labor is investigating complaints about unpaid wages and benefits to former employees.

The story is a case study in what happens when a company pivots too slowly, then too aggressively. Bollinger was founded in 2014 by Robert Bollinger with a cult following for its boxy, off-road consumer EVs. In 2022, Mullen Automotive acquired a controlling stake and pushed the company to abandon consumer vehicles entirely in favor of Class 4 commercial trucks - a higher-margin segment but one with a much longer and more capital-intensive sales cycle. The pivot made strategic sense on paper. In practice, Bollinger ran out of cash before it could close enough commercial contracts to sustain itself. The company shut down in November 2025 and entered receivership in December. The online auction runs May 13 at 10 a.m. ET. The trucks themselves have almost no mileage on them - which, in its own way, is the saddest part of this story.

Key Points

• Founded in 2014; once held $675M in pre-orders for commercial EVs

• Mullen Automotive acquired controlling stake in 2022; company pivoted to Class 4 commercial trucks

• Shut down operations in November 2025 after running out of cash

• Court-ordered into receivership December 2025 over $6.2M in unpaid supplier bills

• Michigan MEDC seeking ~$1M repayment of a $3M state economic development grant

• 427 lots - including 20 nearly-new Bollinger B4 trucks - go to auction May 13, 2026

Lessons for Founders

Bollinger's collapse carries a message that goes beyond EV market timing. State grants and supplier relationships are liabilities, not free money - when things go wrong, they come back as legal exposure. More importantly, pivoting your entire business model to chase a higher-margin customer segment only works if you have enough runway to survive the longer enterprise sales cycle. Bollinger pivoted away from consumer vehicles (faster to close, lower margin) into commercial fleets (slower to close, higher margin) without enough cash in the bank to bridge the gap. The trucks ran just fine. The business model didn't make it out of the driveway.

Sources: Autoblog  |  Crain's Detroit Business  |  Carscoops