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While summer may be starting to wane, investors’ appetite for all things AI is not.

Anthropic — a ChatGPT rival with its AI assistant Claude — raised a $100 million round from SK Telecom, as South Korea’s largest telco looks to grow its AI-related telecommunications business.

As part of the deal, the San Francisco-based AI startup will build a large language model customized for telcos.

In the last 16 months, Anthropic has raised more than $1.4 billion. In April 2022, the startup raised a $580 million Series B led by disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

Then in February, it was reported that Google had invested $300 million in the startup.

Finally in May, the company raised a $450 million Series C led by Spark Capital with participation from Google, Salesforce Ventures1, Sound Ventures, Zoom Ventures and others. Anthropic did not release a valuation, but the round came after reports it was raising a round at a pre-investment valuation of $4.1 billion.

Big rounds

The big round comes after other reports late last week that Modular, an AI software developer that allows users to train machine-learning models on a variety of chips, is in talks with General Catalyst and others to raise a Series A at a $600 million valuation.

The new rounds — both announced and reported — add to an impressive collection of huge raises by AI startups already this year as investors fear being left behind on the game-changing AI trend.

Startups such as AlphaSense, Character.ai and Adept AI have raised massive nine-figure rounds this calendar year at astronomical valuations.

Of course the craze started in January with news of Microsoft’s massive $10 billion investment into OpenAI — creator of ChatGPT.

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Illustration: Dom Guzman