“Having someone who is invested in you, who you can trust, and who can help you find mutual successes is great, and we got that from the beginning with Salesforce Ventures.”
The generative AI boom is often framed as a race for raw power — who has the most capital or compute. For us, the story of Anthropic didn’t start with a quest for the biggest cluster. It started with a desire to find the best team bringing AI models to the enterprise.
We first invested in Anthropic’s Series C in early 2023, and we’ve stood by their side through every subsequent round since, including their latest Series G in February 2026. Supporting Anthropic’s journey from early research to their current scale has provided a front-row seat to the incredible pace of change in the AI era.
A Bet on Constitutional AI
In the summer of 2022, OpenAI released DALL-E 2. The visual impact of pixels synthesized to create beautiful, realistic imagery (for that time) made us think something could be afoot in the AI space, and we started researching the market in earnest. ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022 validated our suspicion; generative AI could lead to a platform shift.
Working with the Salesforce AI Research team, led by Chief Scientist Silvio Savarese, we developed a conviction that durable value would initially accrue at the foundation model layer, where deep research expertise creates meaningful barriers to entry. Anthropic was uniquely positioned. The founding team had published seminal papers on scaling laws and reinforcement learning and had helped build GPT-2 and GPT-3 while at OpenAI. They possessed a rare “founder-market fit” and the foresight to focus on long-term technical advantage rather than short-term optimization.
Our initial meeting with co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei took place in early 2023 in San Francisco. Dario spoke passionately about reinventing productivity and knowledge work. While inspired, we remained skeptical: how could an intelligent chatbot revolutionize the economy?
Then Dario laid out the roadmap for how the model would improve beyond its current capabilities and introduced “Constitutional AI,” which felt more like a philosophy for Anthropic than a training method. It uses a set of principles (the “constitution”) to guide a model’s behavior toward being “helpful, harmless, and honest.” Well before AI safety became a central regulatory debate, Anthropic believed frontier AI would only achieve widespread adoption if it was built to be safe and interpretable from the ground up. This stood in stark contrast to other labs chasing near-term usage.
At the time, alignment relied on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, a fine-tuning technique that doesn’t scale well. Constitutional AI was more elegant, allowing the machine to supervise itself through its written principles. After testing this approach with our network of Fortune 500 CIOs and Salesforce product teams, we realized this wasn’t just a safety feature; it was a key selling point. We believed enterprises would value having control over their own model’s “constitution.”
Daniela Amodei, co-founder and President of Anthropic, at Dreamforce 2024 with Salesforce CTO Parker Harris and TIME EIC Sam Jacobs.
A Focused Approach
During Anthropic’s Series C, the debate over model commoditization was front and center, as it remains today. Our conviction in Anthropic was rooted in the observation that, in an emerging industry where the foundational technology changes daily, the delta between winners and losers lies in execution speed and relentless focus.
Neerav Kingsland, Head of Strategic Initiatives at Anthropic, explained his team’s philosophy at that time: “We’re not optimizing for next week’s viral demo. We’re optimizing for the moment an enterprise asks a model to write sensitive code or analyze a complex medical trial.”
That focus manifested in concrete choices. Anthropic built Claude with Slack in mind — where enterprise data lives — and zeroed in on specific use cases: coding, tool use, and later, reasoning. Within a year of launch, that philosophy was proven — rapid customer iteration revealed Claude’s core differentiators: code generation, customization, and data security. This drove the Claude 2 family of models, showcasing the early coding capabilities now central to their value proposition.
The competitive landscape at the time was intimidating, but we understood what mattered: enterprise revenue is hard to earn, but far more durable. With this understanding, our continued investment in Anthropic’s subsequent funding rounds — from Series D through Series G — has been an easy decision.
Throughout our partnership, Salesforce Ventures has sought to provide Anthropic with not only capital, but also a window into how global enterprises actually function. We stress-tested Claude in demanding environments: data residency in Europe, model steerability under load, etc. We’ve also introduced Anthropic to a network of Fortune 500 leaders who have become deep partners and customers, including Coinbase, Barclays, and Accenture. Today, Claude powers Slack AI and serves as Agentforce’s preferred model in regulated industries.
Neerav later reflected: “Having someone who is invested in you, who you can trust, and who can help you find mutual successes is great, and we got that from the beginning with Salesforce Ventures as they were helping us meet the right people at the right time.”
Kate Jensen, Anthropic’s Head of Americas, at Dreamforce 2024 with Paul Drews, Claudine Emeott, and Together AI CEO Vipul Ved Prakash.
Market Validation
A core belief in betting on the foundation model layer is that it would become essential infrastructure, and Claude has most certainly become that. The company’s momentum is driven by enterprises selecting AI partners capable of operating in high-stakes, high-ROI environments.
The evolution of Claude Code is the most visible example. It has meaningfully improved developer productivity and compressed development timelines to the point that companies not using it are now at a disadvantage. Claude Code is now often the wedge that gets Anthropic in the door, allowing the team to expand into horizontal and vertical use cases across the enterprise. Anthropic also continues to expand into regulated industries — financial services, life sciences, and healthcare — where the AI workflows customers build with Claude are central to their operations.
In short, Claude Code has taken off, and we’re witnessing firsthand what Dario meant when he spoke of reinventing productivity back in 2023.
Beyond the Hype
In 2023, betting on a research-heavy startup at a meaningful valuation was not obvious, given there was no market precedent of AI research turning into commercial success. Today, Anthropic is the canonical success story of the AI era, proving that you can move from seminal research to a multi-product platform company that captures the world’s imagination. They also proved that a shared commitment to culture and trust can remain substantive even at a scale of thousands of employees.
As Anthropic enters its next phase of growth, we remain steadfast in our belief in this team. The frontier is still moving, and the questions are only getting harder. That is exactly where Salesforce Ventures and Anthropic want to be.
