TMTPOST -- Anthropic has closed its latest funding round with a post-money valuation of $61.5 billion. The $3.5 billion round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with additional investments from Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Investments, Fidelity Management & Research Co., General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners, and Jane Street, among others. Founded by former OpenAI research executives, Anthropic is a heavily Amazon-backed AI startup. The company launched its generative AI chatbot, Claude, in March 2023. Like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, Claude has rapidly gained popularity as businesses adopt AI-driven solutions for sales, marketing, and customer service. The company plans to use the new funding to advance the development of next-generation AI, with a focus on expanding its compute capacity, advancing research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerating international expansion in Asia and Europe, according to the release.