Zoom's $51 Million Anthropic Investment Now Worth $1 Billion | PYMNTS.com

That's according to a report Friday (May 22) from Bloomberg News, citing a regulatory filing. The total value of the videoconferencing firm's stake in the artificial intelligence startup is about $1.27 billion, the report added, a number that could climb as Anthropic wraps another round of funding.

Zoom invested $51 million in Anthropic in 2023 as part of a partnership to use the company's Claude models.

Since then, the Bloomberg report added, Anthropic has turned into one of the fastest-growing and most-watched startups in the world.

Zoom's assessment of its stake in Anthropic is based on a fundraising round from February valuing the company at $380 billion, though the startup is reportedly close to finalizing a round at a valuation of more than $900 billion, and by some calculations, as high as $1 trillion.

"A timely investment in a financial rocket ship" has helped boost Zoom's share price in recent weeks, KeyBanc analyst Jackson Ader said in a note after Zoom's quarterly earnings report last week, the report added.

In other AI news, recent PYMNTS Intelligence research shows a lack of progress in preparing workers to use AI on the job.

An April PYMNTS Intelligence study, "Wage to Wallet™ Index - The Resilience Deficit: Labor Workers in an Automated Economy," found that close to half of all workers in the United States in salaried or higher-paying roles had gotten no on-the-job training on how to use AI tools, new technologies or automated processes in their positions in the prior 12 months.

"College graduates know how to use ChatGPT to write essays and Google Gemini's Nano Banana to generate images and edit photos, but too few workers are getting too little guidance on how to use the technological tools increasingly penetrating the workplace," PYMNTS wrote.

A separate PYMNTS Intelligence report from earlier this month, "Financial Services Pulls Ahead in the Enterprise AI Race," revealed that companies are rapidly embedding AI into their workflows and operations.

"Financial services firms have scaled AI across nearly three times as many tasks as healthcare firms, concentrating their deployment in back-office functions like revenue recognition, credit risk assessment and sales forecasting," the report said. "Healthcare is deploying AI through customer service chatbots. Media and advertising companies are using AI for content quality assurance, board and executive briefing preparation, and improving logistics."