Anthropoic, the San Francisco-based AI lab announced Thursday it has closed a $65 billion Series H funding round at a post-money valuation of $965 billion, making it the most valuable AI startup in the world and, at least on paper, and nudging it right up to the edge of the trillion-dollar club.

 

The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital. Each of those lead investors put in more than $2 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Co-leaders included Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ, and XN. A long tail of institutional names also joined, among them Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, DST Global, Fidelity Management and Research, General Catalyst, Insight Partners, Jane Street, Lightspeed Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and Temasek. Strategic infrastructure partners Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix also came aboard.

 

Roughly $15 billion of the $65 billion total was made up of previously committed investments from hyperscalers, including a $5 billion tranche from Amazon.

 

Revenue Is the Real Story

Funding rounds at this scale always raise the question of what exactly is being bought. In Anthropic's case, the answer appears to be a business that is already moving fast. The company said its annualized run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month, driven by enterprise deployments of its Claude models and a growing base of everyday users. That is an astonishing number, and it frames this raise less as a bet on future potential and more as a capital infusion into something that is already operating at scale.

 

For context, Anthropic was valued at $380 billion in February after its Series G, which brought in $30 billion. The Series H nearly triples that figure in a matter of months. The pace of that valuation expansion is something the financial world has not seen.

 

Brad Gerstner, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, framed the investment in pertty straightforward terms. The momentum Anthropic has built with enterprise customers, he said, positions the company to lead the next phase of AI development. Dragoneer managing partner Marc Stad pointed to intelligence becoming an increasingly critical ingredient in how businesses operate and deliver products.

 

Topping OpenAI, For Now

The benchmark everyone is measuring against is OpenAI, which disclosed a $852 billion valuation following a $122 billion funding round back in March. Anthropic's $965 billion post-money figure now tops that. Whether that gap holds, widens, or reverses is anyone's guess, since both companies are raising capital at a pace that makes any static comparison feel temporary. Still, the symbolic weight of Anthropic moving ahead of OpenAI in the private market valuation race is not nothing.

 

The funding also coincides with what TechCrunch and others have reported could be Anthropic's final private fundraise before an IPO. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly preparing for public market debuts, possibly as early as this year, partly to access the kind of sustained capital needed to keep building and running frontier models.

 

Compute Is the Constraint

A chunk of this capital is earmarked for the unsexy but mission-critical problem of compute. Anthropic has reportedly been bumping up against capacity limits in recent months, including imposing usage restrictions during peak hours and nudging users toward off-peak windows by offering more compute then. The company has been moving aggressively to address that. It signed agreements with Amazon for up to five gigawatts of new compute capacity, struck a separate deal with Google and Broadcom for five gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity, and inked a deal with SpaceX for GPU access across the Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 facilities. Claude is available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, with Amazon remaining Anthropic's primary cloud and training partner.

 

CFO Krishna Rao stated that: the company is experiencing historic demand and the funding is there to serve it, keep Anthropic at the research frontier, and expand Claude into more of the places where work happens.

 

Political Friction Has Not Slowed the Checks

It is worth noting that all of this is happening while Anthropic remains in a fairly unusual position with the U.S. government. Earlier this year, the company refused a Pentagon demand to remove safeguards blocking Claude from being used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weapons systems. That refusal resulted in Anthropic being blacklisted from military contracts, and a legal challenge to that blacklisting is still pending. The company holds a $200 million Defense Department contract that now sits in a complicated limbo.

 

On top of that, cybersecurity researchers have flagged concerns around Anthropic's Claude Mythos model, a specialized system that some experts worry could lower the barrier to advanced cyberattacks. Anthropic said Thursday that Mythos could be made publicly available within weeks as the company finalizes expanded safeguards around it.

 

None of it appears to have dampened investor enthusiasm. If anything, the sheer breadth of the investor list suggests that the private market has largely decided that Anthropic's safety-first positioning is a feature, not a liability, at least when it comes to enterprise adoption.

 

Thursday's announcement also landed on the same day the company released Claude Opus 4.8, the latest iteration of its flagship model. It was a very busy day for Anthropic.

 

Stablecoin infrastructure startup Checker has just raised over $8 million across pre-seed and seed funding rounds to accelerate development of its stablecoin network.

 

The funding round was led by Galaxy Ventures, Al Mada Ventures, and Framework Ventures, with participation from Onigiri, IGNIA, Cerulean, Aquanow, Commerce Ventures, Pharsalus Capital, SNZ Capital, DFS Lab, Breed, Overlook, Velocity, Bitso Business, and AirTM.

 

Other angel investors involved in the round include Stripe, Tala, Flutterwave, Mesh, ComplyAdvantage, and Superstate, among others.

 

 

With this new funding, the Checker team aims to accelerate its global expansion plans while building a credit infrastructure embedded within its platform that allows users to lend and borrow without always having to pre-fund their accounts. The team also plans to automate its operations by building AI agents to handle treasury management, back office operations, and predictive analytics, all aimed at helping the platform scale efficiently.

 

Another goal for the Checker team is to solve the fragmentation problem currently facing stablecoin infrastructure. Despite the growing adoption of stablecoins and tokenized assets, liquidity fragmentation, operational complexity, and compliance hurdles continue to hamper large-scale adoption, particularly among institutions.

 

While institutions have adopted several makeshift solutions to work around these hurdles, such solutions are often difficult to maintain and scale. This is the problem Checker aims to solve.

 

Through its single API, institutions can launch and scale products across trading, payments, treasury, and credit markets. Institutions do not need to worry about integrating multiple providers into their platforms, as Checker abstracts these complex integration processes into a single API connection.

 

About Checker 

Checker is a stablecoin infrastructure startup that allows financial institutions access to stablecoin and fiat liquidity through its single API platform. Its platform currently supports over 75 currencies, supporting over 50 liquidity providers, including exchanges, OTC desks, and banks. 

 

Since its launch, Checker has processed several billion dollars, processing over 43 billion within its first 12 months of operation. It also serves several financial institutions across the US, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, notable among them are Rail, which was acquired by Ripple, and Brasa Bank in Brazil.

 

 

Leading startup accelerator Y Combinator will be holding the first-ever interview session in New York City, keenly focused on fintech builders developing projects around tokenization, stablecoins, prediction markets, and trading.

 

 

According to a YC spokesperson, the New York event will be the first of its kind, as it will focus on a specific sector, with accepted startups joining the Y Combinator Summer 2026 batch, which will begin on June 23 in San Francisco. Once a startup is accepted into the accelerator program, Y Coombinator will invest immediately in the company, even before the summer batch begins.

 

With New York becoming a major fintech hub in the U.S. and accounting for around 30% of all U.S. fintech investment in 2025, while also being home to roughly 1,500 crypto and fintech startups, Y Combinator is making this move to tap into this fast-growing sector and back more startups in the space.

 

Y Combinator Investing in Crypto

Through its funding, Y Combinator has helped support some of the most successful companies in the crypto space, with several reaching and surpassing unicorn status.

 

In 2012, Y Combinator invested about $150,000 into the crypto exchange Coinbase, acquiring an approximately 7% stake in the company. With support from Y Combinator and other early investors, Coinbase has grown into one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, with a market cap of around $52 billion.

 

Y Combinator also invested early in the decentralized exchange Uniswap, contributing about $120,000 in 2018. Like Coinbase, Uniswap has grown into one of the largest decentralized exchanges, with a valuation of around $2 billion.

 

The startup accelerator has also invested in the prediction market sector, backing Kalshi at an early stage. With support from early investors, including Y Combinator, Kalshi has grown into one of the leading prediction market companies and recently raised $1 billion in a Series F round, reaching a valuation of $22 billion.

 

Other crypto companies that have benefited from Y Combinator’s support include the NFT marketplace OpenSea, blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs, and the Solana-based trading platform Axiom, with all of these companies surpassing the $1 billion valuation mark.

 

 

Prediction market platform Polymarket is reportedly in talks with investors to raise 400 million dollars. If successful, this would place the prediction market company at a valuation of 15 billion dollars, up from its current $9 billion.

 

While there is still no official confirmation from Polymarket regarding this news, the fundraising is expected to drive Polymarket’s growing influence in the expanding prediction market sector, giving it a competitive advantage over its competitors, particularly Kalshi.

 

This move comes a few weeks after Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), invested 600 million dollars into Polymarket. This followed an earlier investment of 1 billion dollars into the prediction market company a few months prior.

 

So far, Polymarket has raised over $2 billion across several fundraising rounds from venture capital firms and investors, including Intercontinental Exchange, Blockchain Capital, Polychain Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase Ventures, 1789 Capital, Ethereum co founder Vitalik Buterin, Aave founder Stani Kulechov, among several other investors.

 

Prediction Market Firms Grapple With Regulatory Uncertainty

Despite how remarkable the global prediction market sector has grown in recent times, prediction market companies still face several regulatory challenges, ranging from state level lawsuits to nationwide bans.

 

Several U.S. states, including New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Arizona, have taken strict regulatory action against prediction market companies, with many state regulators alleging that these companies offer illegal sports event contracts. At least 12 states in the U.S. have filed civil lawsuits against prediction market companies.

 

Outside the U.S., prediction market companies have also faced strict regulatory scrutiny. Just this year alone, about four countries in Europe, Portugal, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, and Hungary, have imposed nationwide bans on Polymarket’s activities.

 

However, despite this harsh regulatory landscape, the global prediction market continues to grow. In the most recent quarter, global trading volume across prediction market companies exceeded $ 26 billion, a 90 percent increase from the previous quarter. This volume, according to the global equity research firm Bernstein, is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2030.