Raison invests $1.5 million in ChatGPT's competitor

Almaty-based Raison Holding has invested in American startup Anthropic, a competitor of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT. The financing amounted to $1.5 million, and the investment was made in the company's Series C round.

Anthropic is one of the world's leading developers of generative artificial intelligence, alongside OpenAI and Google DeepMind. The company was founded in California in 2021 by natives of OpenAI, who were responsible for creating the GPT-2 and GPT-3 models. In particular, the head of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, was the vice president of OpenAI research.

Anthropic's AI assistant is called Claude and has similar functionality to ChatGPT while processing three times the amount of text and computer code. The assistant is available as a plugin in the Slack application, on the Poe platform, and as a paid API.

In just two years since its founding, the company has raised over $1 billion from investors, including Google, Spark Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and Zoom Ventures. During the Series C round, the company raised $450 million at an estimated valuation of approximately $4.5 billion.

Andrew Berezin, Managing Partner at Raison:

— Artificial intelligence is one of the most talked about technologies today; ChatGPT is used by over 100 million people. And this is not just hype: according to Goldman Sachs, artificial intelligence will increase global GDP by 7% over the next 10 years. This technology has a considerable future, so we have invested in one of its leading developers.

Raison is an international investment holding company with offices in Almaty, Tallinn, and San Francisco, founded by Andrey Berezin and Alexander Zaitsev. The holding company includes Raison Asset Management, whose venture portfolio comprises more than 35 private technology companies, including Elon Musk's SpaceX.