The Exec Behind Anthropic’s Revenue Surge Unpacks the A.I. Giant’s ‘Secret Sauce’
Anthropic AI' displayed against red background" width="970" height="647" data-caption='Amol Avasare, Anthropic’s growth chief, details how research focus and transparency define the company’s success. <span class="media-credit">Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images</span>'>
Amol Avasare, Anthropic’s head of growth, landed his job through a cold email in 2024 to Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, best known for co-founding Instagram. When Avasare first joined the company, sales were in the hundreds of millions. Annualized revenue hit roughly $1 billion by the end of the year, rose to $9 billion in 2025, and now stands at about $19 billion. Avasare currently leads a team of roughly 40 people
Avasare, who currently leads a team of around 40, credits Anthropic’s meteoric rise to its strength in research, early focus areas, and a uniquely open company culture. “I’ve not met a single person who’s checked out. Everyone is putting everything they have on the table,” he said on an episode of the tech show Lenny’s Podcast, hosted by Lenny Rachitsky, released yesterday (April 5).
Originally from Australia, Avasare joined Anthropic after leading growth at fintech company Mercury and education platform MasterClass. He also co-founded Ensue, an A.I.-powered mental health tool.
His career path hasn’t been without hardship. In 2022, Avasare suffered a traumatic brain injury during a Muay Thai sparring session, forcing him to step away from work for nine months. The injury isn’t fully healed, he said, and symptoms like dizziness and headaches persist. He manages them with regular breaks at Anthropic’s San Francisco office, which has a meditation room for employees.
Such balance is crucial for the demanding work Avasare oversees, which ranges from acquisitions, user activation, product launches, monetization and more. Roughly 30 percent of his team’s efforts are “more standard bread-and-butter growth work,” said Avasare. The remaining 70 percent tackles what Anthropic internally calls “success disasters,” referring to the challenges that accompany rapid scale.
The “late mover” advantage
Anthropic has excelled in enterprise A.I. tools and coding, niches that helped distinguish it from more consumer-focused rivals like OpenAI. This focus was partly circumstantial, Avasare explained, given Anthropic’s smaller size and later arrival to the A.I. scene.
“We didn’t have the free cash flow or the distribution of a Meta or Google, we didn’t have the first-mover advantage of an OpenAI,” he said. “You just have to really pick a very narrow focus—even for a very generalizable technology—to maximize your chances of getting to escape velocity.”
Another driver of growth is Anthropic’s company culture, which Avasare calls its “secret sauce” that “no one else is going to be able to replicate.” The startup’s mission-driven philosophy of building safe A.I. systems that benefit humanity has been a priority since co-founders and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei launched the company in 2021 with a group of former OpenAI staffers.
Anthropic’s culture is not only driven but radically open. Transparency is built into everyday workflows, such as through internal Slack feeds called “notebooks,” where employees publicly jot down ideas and updates related to A.I. and company operations. That openness extends to the leadership level. Avasare recalled a moment when a staffer challenged CEO Dario Amodei directly on Slack after disagreeing with a comment he made during an all-hands meeting.
“That sort of thing, where it’s encouraged to go to leadership and disagree with them, challenge them publicly—I think that just leads to a level of trust,” said Avasare. “We have this very, very deep sense of togetherness.”