AI startup Anthropic to build out public sector team

Anthropic, a rapidly growing artificial intelligence startup, is further expanding its operations into the public sector market, beginning with the hiring of its first public sector sales chief.

An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed Thursday to Nextgov/FCW that Thiyagu Ramasamy, who most recently worked for more than six years at Amazon Web Services, is the company’s new head of public sector sales.

Ramasamy will be responsible for owning the go-to-market strategy for Anthropic and its AI products, including Claude — a direct competitor to OpenAI’s generative AI ChatGPT suite — and building out a team to meet federal, state and local government agency mission needs.

“This role brings together my career journey from state and local government to civilian federal work, and the past decade supporting national security customers,” Ramasamy said in a LinkedIn post. “I am committed to enabling the public sector and positively impacting all of its end customers. I fully believe that generative AI is here to stay and will be the foundational technology that will power the next generation of change.”

Founded in 2021, the San Francisco-based firm has already raised more than $10 billion in investments from venture capital firms and tech companies, including Salesforce, Google and Amazon. Earlier this week, multiple media outlets reported new funding talks could push Anthropic’s valuation to $60 billion, triple its value in 2024.

Last year, Anthropic also announced an important new customer: the federal government, including classified users within the U.S. intelligence community.

Through its partnership with Amazon Web Services, government users can access the commercially-popular Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude 3 Haiku AI models through AWS GovCloud and in the AWS Marketplace for the U.S. Intelligence Community.

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