Meet the brother-sister-duo behind Anthropic’s record breaking $13B raise and $183B valuation surge
Dario and Daniela Amodei aren’t your typical Silicon Valley founders. They’re siblings who once worked side by side at OpenAI, building some of the most powerful AI systems the world has ever seen.
On paper, they were living the dream. But behind the scenes, they couldn’t shake a nagging fear – what if this technology grew faster than our ability to control it? Dario, a scientist who obsessed over why AI made the choices it did, worried about what could happen if we didn’t fully understand these systems. Daniela, who managed people and culture, saw how easy it was for safety to get sidelined in the race to be first.
By 2020, the two made a gutsy call, they left OpenAI. A year later, along with a small team of like-minded colleagues, they launched their own company, Anthropic.
At first, it was a tough sell. A startup focused on safe AI? Investors didn’t even know what that meant. All the while competitors were racing ahead with splashy products, and Anthropic looked like the cautious cousin.
But the Amodeis doubled down on their idea. Instead of just making AI smarter, they’d make it safer, more aligned with human values, and force it to say no when asked to do harmful things.
Their big break came in 2023 with the launch of Claude, Anthropic’s answer to ChatGPT. Claude was careful, but not timid. Businesses loved it, especially those worried about risk and reliability.
Soon, big players like Amazon and Google started pouring billions into Anthropic. Then growth went into overdrive.
At the start of 2025, Anthropic’s revenue run-rate was hovering around $1 billion. By the end of summer, it had shot past $5 billion, thanks to over 300,000 companies signing up. One of their products, Claude Code, was already pulling in about $500 million a year on its own.
That momentum set up a record-breaking moment.
In September 2025, Anthropic raised $13 billion in a single funding round, with investors like ICONIQ, Fidelity, and Lightspeed lining up.
The company’s valuation exploded to $183 billion, triple what it had been just six months earlier. In less than five years, Anthropic went from a small team of worried researchers to one of the fastest-growing tech companies in history.
For Dario and Daniela, though, it was never just about chasing the biggest number. Their mission hasn’t changed: build AI that’s powerful, but safe enough to trust.
Anthropic’s story isn’t just about a startup winning big. It’s about whether the world can build AI at breakneck speed, without losing sight of the human values that should guide it.
