There’s money in mid-market IT spending, and Anthropic, backed by private equity and banking giants and leveraging a cloud partner network, is gunning for it.
Anthropic and a group of investors are launching a standalone AI-native enterprise services company for midsize businesses to build custom Claude-powered systems for core business operations, and the new companies will join its Claude partner network.
“Companies ranging from community banks to mid-market manufacturers to community health systems stand to benefit from AI, but lack the internal resources to build and run cutting-edge deployments,” Anthropic said in a press release.
To provide expertise, the AI model maker said its applied AI engineers will work with the new company’s engineers to understand customers’ operations, identify areas where Claude can help, and build custom systems.
Anthropic did not respond to an email seeking comment.
“There are some very strong reasons to focus on the mid-market,” said Shari Raba, group vice president of AI, data and automation at IDC. register. “First of all, there are a huge number of midsize companies…Second, midsize companies tend to be more agile, which they need to be in order to compete effectively. They also tend to have more streamlined decision-making, more collaboration among executives, and less risk aversion, while often having less technical debt.”
Lava agreed with Anthropic that the company also tends to lack the in-house skills to tackle large-scale AI projects and doesn’t get much attention from large enterprise-focused vendors, meaning it’s a greenfield for Anthropic.
“While most projects work with multiple hyperscalers and SaaS companies, most projects have little direct support from the vendor, meaning partners are key to any deal,” she said. register. “Midmarkets have faster sales cycles and a higher willingness to pay for custom integrations than fragmented small businesses, but they are less tied to the large vendor ecosystem than enterprises.”
Gary McConnell, CEO of VirtuIT, a national solutions provider focused on mid-market customers, said Anthropic offers partners a “huge opportunity” to win services business by addressing the lack of AI adoption among mid-market customers.
“Ultimately, I think this is a huge opportunity,” he said. “The idea is not to do more with less, but to do more with more. So as these models become connected and can generate more data, the data that is generated needs to be backed up, backup pools grow, storage grows, and it needs to be placed in local computing or cloud computing. There are so many consulting elements that the AI opportunity brings into the equation.”
McConnell said VirtuIT is considering partnership deals with multiple AI companies, including Anthropic. He said the largest customer base for Anthropic’s services will likely come from financial backers.
To fund independent service companies, Anthropic partnered with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs. McConnell believes this is a way for Anthropic to get an early win.
“They have portfolio companies that fall into these large conglomerates that generate sales pipelines,” he said. “If you’re a portfolio company owned by Goldman Sachs, you’re not going to run on OpenAI’s platform. It’s that simple.”
Anthropic’s drive to build bespoke software for its customers appears to be fueling a SaaS apocalypse narrative that revolves around replacing large legacy IT platforms with AI tools. Lava said the deal, if executed well, could displace some small and medium-sized SaaS vendors while complementing larger SaaS providers by introducing agent workflows to the mid-market.
“I think this could put pressure on SaaS players and even other legacy applications outside of the cloud, especially in the near term for app providers outside of core enterprise apps like ERP and CRM,” she said. “While it’s a risk to migrate core apps, midsize businesses have many other applications, many of which are starting to grow rapidly in the midsize market, including expense apps, PM tools, and marketing apps.”
McConnell said there is demand in the mid-market for new approaches to software management that Anthropic can leverage.
“I think over time, companies will continue to demonstrate the business value to their organizations and be able to say, ‘We don’t need this legacy CRM that hasn’t been touched in manufacturing for 30 years. We can build this fairly cheaply. We can use the tools we already use,'” McConnell said. ®
