Barely a month after raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from Google LLC, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup Anthropic has closed on another round of financing that’s said to be worth $300 million.

The round, which brings Anthropic’s value to $4.1 billion, was led by Spark Capital. The news was first reported by The Information.

Last February, it was reported that Google had invested $300 million into the startup. According to the Financial Times, that deal gave Google a 10% stake in the company, and came just two weeks after its rival Microsoft Corp. invested $10 billion in ChatGPT creator OpenAI LLC.

Anthropic was founded in January 2021 by a team of researchers, engineers, policy experts and others with experience with the AI breakthroughs such as the large language model such as GPT-3, which is what powers ChatGPT. Its team also specializes in reinforcement learning from human feedback that allows machine learning models to learn quickly to become more conversational based on positive or negative feedback.

The startup is focused on AI safety and is determined to build more reliable and steerable systems that provide more predictable results. In this way, the team hopes, it can eliminate bias and overcome one of the key limitations of conversational AI.

Anthropic’s AI chatbot, Claude, is currently accessible only in closed beta, but a paper detailing its goals notes that it’s expected to combat harmful prompts by explaining why they are dangerous or misguided.

Anthropic was already extremely well-funded even prior to this year, having raised $704 million via Series A and B rounds in 2022. The Series B round was notably led by the now-disgraced FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

The sky-high valuation of Anthropic, which generates minimal revenue, reflects the incredible fervor that has been generated by the emergence of so-called generative AI, fueled by the rise of ChatGPT last year. Generative AI refers to AI algorithms that can generate text, images and other media when prompted to do so by users.

It’s an area that has been the subject of years of research and it seems that those efforts are finally beginning to pay off. Analysts believe the capabilities displayed by ChatGPT could be useful in dozens of applications, and perhaps even rival Google LLC in online search.

This week alone, generative AI startups have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capital firms. On Tuesday, Salesforce Ventures, the VC arm of Salesforce Inc., announced the launch of a new $250 million fund that seeks to invest in promising generative AI startups. It’s planning to invest in four companies, including Anthropic, Cohere Inc., Hearth.AI and SuSea Inc., creator of the natural language search website You.com.

Also this week, the New York-based conversational AI startup Amelia LLC said it had raised $175 million via BuildGroup and Monroe Capital, while Humane Inc., also based in New York and a partner of OpenAI, raised $100 million.

Image: Macrovector/Freepik