Anthropic Buys AI Startup Vercept After Meta Poached Founder

Vercept, a Seattle-based business that specialises in AI “computer-use” agents and an AI business with ties to some of the greatest names in Seattle’s technological sector, was bought by Anthropic on Wednesday through an announcement made. In order to assist in expanding Claude Code, Anthropic purchased the coding agent engine Bun in December. This acquisition is the most recent. And it is known to be a well-calculated “talent and technology” grab to improve Claude’s capacity to handle complicated operating systems and applications on his own.

Vercept had developed tools for more complicated agentic tasks, such as Vy, a cloud-based computer-use agent that could control an Apple MacBook remotely. One of the numerous firms attempting to reinvent the personal computer for the era of AI agents is Vercept. Anthropic is closing Vercept’s product on March 25 as part of the agreement.

The long-running Allen Institute for AI gave rise to Seattle’s AI-focused incubator A12, which produced the business. The co-founders of Vercept also had ties to the Allen Institute and had previously worked as researchers there. Matt Deitke, one of the co-founders, gained notoriety last year when he was one of the AI researchers who convinced Meta to pay him a staggering salary of $250 million to join its Superintelligence Lab. In a post on X on Wednesday, Deitke praised his former coworkers. It is said that with the acquisition, Ross Girshick, Luca Weihs, and Kiana Ehsani, co-founders of Vercept, would be joining Anthropic. 

In the area, Vercept was a comparatively well-known AI startup. Vercept CEO Kiana Ehsani stated that the business had raised a total of $50 million in a LinkedIn post announcing Anthropic’s acquisition. She identified the primary investor as board member Seth Bannon of A12. In January of last year, Vercept revealed that the company had completed a $16 million seed round.

Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Dean, the chief scientist at Google DeepMind, were among the remarkable list of angel investors, according to the member of a press media firm.

In the announcement of the acquisition, Anthropic mentioned co-founders Ross Girshick, Luca Weihs, and Ehsani as part of the team hired to assist Anthropic. Vercept’s co-founders aren’t all joining the Claude maker, though.

Known in Seattle as the founding leader of the Allen Institute for AI, Oren Etzioni has been identified as a co-founder of Vercept and an investor in the firm. He was openly less happy about the acquisition and, like Deitke, is not joining Anthropic. “Vercept is giving up and giving their customers 30 days to leave the platform after a little over a year,” he said on LinkedIn. Sad. Anthropic is welcoming an amazing crew. I hope the best for them!

In addition to being a professor at the University of Washington, Etzioni is well-known for having started and supported numerous firms as a venture capitalist. A request for comment was not answered by him.

Oren Etzioni, a co-founder and investor in Vercept, and Seth Bannon, the primary investor, got into a public argument on LinkedIn over the deal. Bannon lauded the move as a “heroic” accomplishment for the founders, while Etzioni called the result “sad” and criticized the choice to “throw in the towel” rather than continue scaling independently.

Etzioni accused Bannon, Vercept’s principal investor, of being “partly responsible” for Vercept’s failure to hire qualified businesspeople in a LinkedIn post. The investors engaged in a back and forth, with Bannon condemning and denouncing Etzioni’s comments: “… you disparaged the heroic work of the founders for achieving an outcome most could only dream of,” Bannon responded in the LinkedIn string. In addition, they accused one another of other less respectable offenses, such as lying and threatening legal action.

Even while investor arguments in public are amusing and largely pointless, the underlying purpose is noteworthy. Building the next great AI winner is a high-stakes endeavour, and Anthropic will now house a promising firm that raised a respectable war chest.

Etzioni claims he received a return on his investment, although the details of the agreement were not made public. These researchers were obviously wanted by Anthropic (perhaps especially since one of them was at Meta). 

Etzioni told members of the press that he is still disappointed. “We’re essentially throwing in the towel after just a little over a year with so much traction and such a fantastic team, but I’m happy to have gotten a positive return,” he stated.

However, CEO Ehsani’s LinkedIn article suggests that the founders are glad to be joining Anthropic. The options were straightforward: we could work toward the same goal as two different versions of it by building independently, or we could work with an amazing team to bring that vision to life more quickly. About joining Anthropic, she commented, “The decision became an easy choice.

Anthropic’s Sonnet models recently achieved a 72.5% success rate in navigating real-world software, and the acquisition intends to enhance Claude’s performance on benchmarks such as OSWorld.

In relation to the financial background, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Dean, Seth Bannon, and other investors contributed more than $50 million to Vercept, even though the transaction terms were not made public.

In a move away from basic chatbots and toward “autonomous digital employees”, Anthropic acquired Bun, another agentic AI startup, in December.