Case Study
How Salesforce Ventures is Helping Anthropic Build Trusted AI
the opportunity
Build An LLM That Prioritizes Trust & Reliability
In 2021, seven former OpenAI employees joined forces to build Anthropic — an AI company dedicated to developing safe and reliable large language models (LLMs). Two years later the team launched Claude, one of the most capable LLMs in the world. Claude quickly became the primary competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT thanks to its ability to perform a wide range of complex tasks with a focus on safety and reliability.
In the spring of 2023, the team set out to raise a new round of funding to support their growth. While Anthropic had many suitors, the team knew it wanted to partner with an investor that shared their vision of building safe and trustworthy AI.
Salesforce Ventures is in our corner and deeply wants us to succeed.
Neerav Kingsland, Head of Business Development, Anthropic
the solution
Partner With a VC Championing Trustworthy AI
As Salesforce Ventures was preparing to launch our Generative AI Fund, a portfolio founder introduced Anthropic to our team.
At the initiation meeting with co-founder Dario Amodei in January of 2023, it was apparent there was alignment on both sides. Anthropic had distributed earlier iterations of Claude directly through Slack, and both parties felt the potential for more synergies. In addition to Salesforce Ventures’ patient capital and the firm’s commitment to responsible AI, Anthropic felt Salesforce Ventures’ connection to broader Salesforce as well as our customer and executive network could be invaluable to the business during its current phase of growth.
“We were in search of strategic investment from companies we thought we could build a long-term relationship with — companies that could move fast and had big ambitions around AI,” said Neerav Kingsland, Head of Business Development at Anthropic. “Of the large tech companies, we saw Salesforce moving faster than all the others. From Marc [Benioff] all the way down, it was clear their team saw AI coming and shifted their focus more quickly than others, and that impressed us.”
The Salesforce Venture’s team was impressed by the quality of Anthropic’s LLM as well as the team’s focus on constitutional AI — which aligned with the team’s values around responsible AI development. After conducting technical, commercial, and legal due diligence, Salesforce Ventures participated in Anthropic’s $450M Series C round in May of 2023.
the impact
A Wide-Ranging Network of Support
Anthropic partnered with Salesforce Ventures to help them form new strategic partnerships that could grow the business — and that’s exactly what our team sought to deliver from the jump. It started with invites to exclusive Salesforce Ventures Innovation Forums and Demo Days, where portfolio companies are invited to showcase their product with leaders at Fortune 500 businesses.
Through these events, Anthropic had the opportunity to meet with brands like Accenture, Barclays, and Coinbase, who have all gone on to become customers. Anthropic is now a regular speaker at larger Salesforce events like Dreamforce, and more intimate events like the networking dinner co-founder Tom Brown spoke at in December of 2023.
“Having someone who is invested in you, who you can trust, and who can help you find mutual successes is great and we got that from the beginning with Salesforce Ventures as they were helping us meet with the right people at the right time,” said Neerav. “I was able to present to a room of VPs or higher at the Salesforce office during Dreamforce, which was great for generating new business.”
Through the partnership, Anthropic has collaborated with Salesforce’s AI teams on product integrations, including Claude’s implementation in Salesforce Einstein 1 Studio. The partnership has also benefited other startups in the Salesforce Ventures portfolio, as Anthropic offers these businesses discounts on Claude.
“Salesforce Ventures is in our corner and deeply wants us to succeed,” said Neerav. “We need to get to scale very quickly and, relative to other startups, having a plugin with a large enterprise like Salesforce is a big competitive advantage.”
the future
Building Trusted AI Together
Anthropic’s arrow continues to point up. Anthropic recently launched an upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Haiku, as well as an enterprise plan for Claude as the company strives to become the preeminent closed-source LLM in the market.
As they look to the future, the Anthropic team believes they have the right partner in Salesforce Ventures to help them realize their ambitions.
“Salesforce and Salesforce Ventures will be big for our future,” Neerav said. “AI is unique in that it’s still an immature tech on some level, so deployments are just starting to happen within enterprises. Salesforce Ventures has a broader aperture to watch markets and industries and help us navigate the road from immature tech to massive enterprise.”