In the past year, artificial intelligence developer Anthropic has raised billions of dollars at a more than $15 billion valuation due to its fast revenue growth and big projections for future sales. But as Anthropic and scores of rivals mature, they’ll need to prioritize profit margins and cash flows if they want to build a sustainable business and have any hope of going public someday.
New data show that profit margins for such startups may end up lower than for existing enterprise software firms. After paying the costs of customer support and servers to power its AI, Anthropic’s gross margin—gross profit as a percentage of revenue—was between 50% and 55% in December, according to two people with direct knowledge of the figures. That’s far lower than the average gross margin of 77% for cloud software stocks, according to Meritech Capital.
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