Microsoft's new agents, Anthropic's $3.5 billion, and a new startup: This week's AI launches

AI startup Anthropic raised a $3.5 billion Series E funding round this week, valuing itself at $61.5 billion. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, which also included Bessemer Venture Partners and General Catalyst.

The investment will be used to develop the startup’s next-generation AI systems, Anthropic said. It will also go toward adding computing capacity, conducting research, and expanding the company globally.

The company recently released Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which it called its “most intelligent model to date and the first hybrid reasoning model on the market.” Anthropic also introduced Claude Code in a limited research preview.

AI startup Reflection AI came out of stealth this week and announced $130 million in funding, including a $25 million seed round led by Sequoia and CRV, and a Series A round of $105 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and CRV, Bloomberg reported.

The startup, co-founded by Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou — former researchers at Google DeepMind (GOOGL) — wants to build “superintelligent autonomous systems.”

“We believe that solving autonomous coding is the root node problem that will enable superintelligence more broadly,” the company said in a statement. “If you build a superintelligent autonomous coding system, all other verticals of computer-based work will follow.”

Microsoft (MSFT) announced Dragon Copilot this week, which it says is the first voice AI assistant for healthcare clinicians. It can help practitioners streamline work with its natural language voice dictation and ambient listening capabilities, aiding with tasks including documentation, information searches, and clinical evidence summaries, the company said.

Microsoft also introduced two new AI agents this week to help sales representatives:

• Sales Agent can work autonomously to find leads and customers and set up meetings to close deals faster.
• Sales Chat can speed up the sales cycle by gathering information from places such as pitch decks, emails, and the web.

Both AI agents will be available for public preview in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat in May, Microsoft said.