Anthropic’s new way to capture customers: Partner with companies that own them.
The AI giant has a consulting business backed by Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman. The group will be a founding partner, and major investment firms including General Atlantic, Apollo and Sequoia Capital are also backers.
BI’s Alex Nicol and Reid Alexander detail what one insider described as “the McKinsey of AI.”
According to an Anthropic news release, the company wants to work with any company, from community banks to midsize manufacturers, that “stands to benefit from AI but lacks the internal resources to build and execute frontier deployments.”
And wouldn’t you know it, Anthropic’s biggest competitor thinks the same way? Bloomberg reported on Monday that OpenAI has formed its own consulting consortium. This is a collaboration between TPG, Brookfield Asset Management, Advent and Bain.
In theory, everyone involved in this type of partnership can benefit.
Anthropic and OpenAI connect directly to many potential customers through a vast portfolio of backers. Financial companies expect PortCo to streamline the time it takes to start using AI and significantly increase investment. Portfolio companies hire engineers from the world’s top AI startups to help them understand how to best use AI.
Wall Street competitors are getting along in the AI era.
Apollo President James Zelter said at Monday’s Milken conference that competition is not as “brutal” because there is a “big ocean” of opportunity, writes BI’s Bradley Sachs.
There’s a good reason for that. These AI bets require: a lot When it comes to money, there is power in numbers.
(If you’re nearby, Bradley and BI’s Ben Bergman are both at Milken.)
The frenemy approach has been happening on the technology side for a while. The fight for computing and power has created a web of many trades between rivals.
As ferocious as Wall Street is, it also has a history of partnering with technology, especially when it threatens to upend business.
Thirty years ago, banks recognized that the digitization of stock markets could also happen with bonds. Keen to protect the core of their business, they launched their own electronic trading venue. Although they eventually sold a majority stake, the venture still exists and is now a public company, Tradeweb.
it’s not everytime However, it runs smoothly.
More recently, blockchain technology seemed poised to disrupt the banking system, so companies tried to collaborate. R3 was founded in 2014 to create an integrated blockchain system for financial services. It wasn’t long before the hopes of one blockchain to rule them all were dashed by defection.
As long as OpenAI and Anthropic can cook these portfolio companies with AI, all should be well. The only problem is when one is much better than the other.