OpenAI and Anthropic each unveiled separate joint ventures with Wall Street private equity firms on Monday, both built to push their AI models deeper into mid-sized companies. The announcements landed within minutes of each other on May 4. Nobody is bothering to call that a coincidence.
OpenAI's vehicle, internally called DeployCo and publicly The Deployment Company, raised more than $4 billion from 19 investors at a $10 billion valuation, anchored by TPG and supported by Brookfield, Advent, Bain Capital, SoftBank and Dragoneer, per Bloomberg's report. Anthropic's unnamed venture is smaller. Roughly $1.5 billion in commitments, with Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman each putting in around $300 million and Goldman Sachs adding $150 million. Apollo, General Atlantic, GIC, Leonard Green and Sequoia round out the cap table.
Same playbook, different sweeteners
The structures look identical on the surface. PE firms supply capital and a captive customer base of portfolio companies. The labs supply models and engineers. Everyone gets preferred sales access and, eventually, a slice of enterprise services revenue.
The terms are not identical. OpenAI is guaranteeing its PE backers a 17.5% annual return over five years, plus seniority over other partners and downside protection, according to FT reporting. OpenAI is also putting up to $1.5 billion of its own balance sheet behind the vehicle (an initial $500 million in equity, with an option to add another $1 billion) while keeping super-voting control. Anthropic's deal is plain common equity. No floor, no special seniority, no return guarantee.
That gap reads as desperation if you're feeling cynical, or as confidence if you're Anthropic. Take your pick. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $30 billion by late March, mostly on the back of Claude Code. Hard to demand sweeteners when your numbers are doing the talking. OpenAI, by contrast, is paying for distribution it could not build fast enough on its own.
About those IPOs
Both labs are circling public listings as soon as this fall. OpenAI announced $122 billion in new funding at the end of March against a $852 billion valuation. Anthropic is reportedly in the final stages of raising $50 billion at a $900 billion valuation. Public markets reward predictable enterprise revenue. They do not reward research labs handing out API keys.
"Enterprise demand for Claude is significantly outpacing any single delivery model," Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said in the official announcement. Which is the kind of thing CFOs say six months before an IPO regardless of whether it's true. The structure of these deals, though, suggests the framing is at least partly real: both labs need recurring contracted revenue on the books, and they need it now.
Consulting in AI's clothing
Both ventures are betting on the forward-deployed engineer model that Palantir spent two decades building. Engineers embed inside customer organizations, redesign workflows around the AI, and stick around to maintain whatever they ship. It is, functionally, consulting. Companies spend roughly six dollars on services for every dollar they spend on software, per Fortune's reporting, and Accenture, Deloitte and the Big Four built empires on that ratio.
Now the model providers want a cut directly, with PE firms acting as matchmakers between Claude or GPT and the mid-market companies they already control. Blackstone President Jon Gray called the bottleneck in enterprise AI adoption a shortage of "highly skilled implementation partners," per the Blackstone press release. Translation: there are not enough engineers who can actually make the AI work inside a company.
Whether spinning up a new firm to hire those engineers solves the problem, or whether existing systems integrators just need more time, is the bet. Anthropic plans to keep its existing relationships with Accenture, Deloitte and PwC through its Claude Partner Network. The new venture adds capacity, not replacement. The consulting firms may eventually disagree.
OpenAI's DeployCo, run by former COO Brad Lightcap, is expected to begin operations in the coming weeks. Both labs have IPOs penciled in before year-end.
