That's the second-largest private funding round in history, behind only OpenAI. The new valuation puts Anthropic ahead of OpenAI as the most valuable AI company in the world, private or public. Quick transparency up front. I'm not a private equity guy. No insider info on Anthropic. Just trying to make sense of this out loud. Here's what I see happening. Most companies raise pre-seed, seed, then Series A through D. After that they either IPO, get acquired, or run out of road. Anthropic just hit Series H. That isn't necessarily an indication of good or bad. Stripe and SpaceX stayed private on purpose to avoid public-market scrutiny. Slack and Lyft reached Series H and IPO'd within a year. Every company takes a different path. What it does tell you: Anthropic chose to stay private through eight rounds. Bloomberg reported an IPO could come as soon as October of this year. Anthropic's annual revenue jumped from $1 billion in December 2024 to $47 billion this month. Widely cited as the fastest revenue ramp of any software company in history. They now run higher revenue than OpenAI, and the latest projections show them hitting profitability first. Not saying one is "winning" here. Both are still burning billions a year. But the underdog framing for Anthropic is getting harder to defend. What this news has me thinking about is why a company growing this fast still needs another $65 billion. The answer is compute. Dario (the CEO) said it himself a few weeks ago. They planned for 10x growth in 2026. They saw 80x. They literally cannot build datacenters fast enough. Earlier this month, Anthropic leased the entire Colossus 1 datacenter in Memphis from SpaceX. 300 megawatts, over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, $1.25 billion a month. They didn't pick SpaceX over Amazon or Google. Colossus was the only compute available right now. The rest doesn't come online until 2027. This Series H also brought chip manufacturers Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron on as investors. Those three make the high-bandwidth memory that sits on every Nvidia GPU. Getting them invested locks in supply at the most constrained part of the chip stack.

I sat down with Devin Kearns, co-founder & CEO of Custom AI Studio, to break down what it actually takes to build an AI agency with real enterprise value, not just another lifestyle business. We get into why most AI work being sold today won't survive 2027, why the mid-market is the prime opportunity (not SMBs or enterprises), the 11 ways AI experts are actually making money right now, how to position with frameworks instead of being just another vendor, and the five things Devin wishes he knew sooner. If you're building, running, or thinking about starting an AI agency, this is the strategic conversation I wish I'd had two years ago.

I’m curious how everyone has setup their tech stack to pursue this AI Agency route. Are you still buying separate subscriptions, Codex, Claude…etc or using something like Genspark? What tools you cannot do without and/or what will get you by or only when needed?

I’m Abderrahmane, 58 years young, originally from Algeria, now calling Turkey home 🇩🇿➡️🇹🇷 After years of life experience and entrepreneurial curiosity, I’ve stepped into the exciting world of AI automation. I’m in the early stages of building my AI Automation Agency, and right now I’m soaking up as much insight as I can to shape my vision.

Just dropped a new course in the classroom and I'm pretty pumped about this one. It's the full step-by-step on building your own AI OS. Same exact setup I use every day to run the YouTube channel, the community, and my team. 8 lessons, all my templates and prompts, plus a free GitHub repo so you can skip the boring setup and just start building. To unlock it in the classroom, you just need to hit level 3 in the community. Honestly pretty easy: - Drop an intro post if you haven't yet - Engage with a few other members in the threads - Help somebody out who's stuck on something That's pretty much it. Get to level 3 and the whole thing opens up. See you in there. - Nate