Kirkland & Ellis, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Davis Polk & Wardwell have taken lead roles on a major deal that has seen three heavyweight financial backers team up with Anthropic to create a new AI services company.
Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs are partnering with the AI company behind Claude for a joint venture reported to have secured around $1.5bn in committed funding.
The deal will see the formation of a standalone business focused on helping mid-sized companies embed Anthropic’s Claude AI into core operations.
Kirkland advised Blackstone on the deal, with a team led by New York corporate partners Lauren Colasacco and Alan Heisman, alongside technology IP and transactions partners Seth Traxler in Chicago and Amber Harezlak, who splits her time between Salt Lake City and the Bay Area.
Simpson Thacher, meanwhile, advised both San Francisco-headquartered private equity firm Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs.
The team advising Hellman was led by corporate partners Naveed Anwar and Atif Azher in San Francisco, alongside New York IP transactions partners Lori Lesser and Jamie Talbot.
The team for Goldman Sachs was led by New York corporate partners Katherine Krause and Timothy Gaffney, together with capital markets partner Hui Lin.
Davis Polk is understood to be advising Anthropic, with a team including corporate partner Michael Diz, head of the firm’s Northern California office.
Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green & Partners and Sequoia Capital are also investing in the venture and will support its build-out alongside the founding partners.
In a statement, Anthropic said that the new organisation would work with ‘mid-sized companies across sectors to bring Claude into their most important operations’, and that its applied AI engineers would aim to ‘identify where Claude can have the most impact, build custom solutions, and support customers over the long term.’
Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said that enterprise demand for Claude was ‘significantly outpacing any single delivery model’, and that the company’s partnerships ‘with the world’s leading systems integrators are central to how Claude reaches large enterprises.’
The latest deal comes after Freshfields recently agreed a multi-year deal with Anthropic, rolling out Claude across the firm and agreeing to collaborate on development of further AI services and workflows.
In an interview with LB, Freshfields chief innovation officer Gil Perez explained how the firm would work directly with Anthropic’s legal team to ‘explore how we could collaborate and set up workflows between a law firm and Anthropic’, describing the deal as an opportunity to ‘get a glimpse into the future’ which it would then be able to share with clients.
