Anthropic is launching a new venture with financial services firms Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs to sell AI tools to businesses.
The new entity will operate as a standalone company, with Anthropic’s engineering and partnership teams embedded within its structure.
The venture is also backed by a group of asset managers including Apollo, Sequoia Capital and General Atlantic. As part of the deal, the partners will roll out Anthropic’s Claude AI models directly into businesses, beginning with companies within their respective portfolios.
Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s CFO, said the deal reflects growing demand for Claude across enterprise customers and is designed to support wider deployment and scaling.
“Our partnerships with the world’s leading systems integrators are central to how Claude reaches large enterprises,” he said in a blog post. “This new firm brings additional operating capability to the ecosystem, alongside capital from leading alternative asset managers.”
Jon Gray, president and COO of Blackstone, said in a press release: “We believe [the venture] can help address one of the most significant bottlenecks to enterprise AI adoption by expanding the number of highly skilled implementation partners.”
Key use cases are expected across sectors including healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, retail, real estate and infrastructure — aimed at bridging the current skills gap hindering AI systems’ scale up.
“This is a rare convergence: massive market need, the unmatched AI technical capability of Anthropic, and a consortium of investors with the reach to scale fast,” Patrick Healy, CEO at Hellman & Friedman, added. “The near-term value to our portfolio companies is substantial.”
The move is the latest in Anthropic’s efforts to pull ahead in the enterprise AI race, amid intensifying competition with rivals such as OpenAI.
By embedding Claude into a network of investor-owned companies, the AI model maker is solidifying its position amongst mid-market and enterprise customers.
Shortly after the details of Anthropic’s venture emerged, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI has launched its own joint venture focused on corporate AI adoption — The Deployment Company. The firm reportedly has backing from 19 investors, including TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent and Bain Capital.