Meet Krishna Rao, Anthropic CFO who took startup to $380 billion market cap

Anthropic is one of the most talked about AI companies in the world right now. From tools like Claude Code that can write hundreds of lines of code on its own, to Claude Mythos, an AI so powerful that it wasn’t released to the general public. While Anthropic has continued to develop new AI models, its chief financial officer, Krishna Rao, has been working behind the scenes in securing funds for the startup.

As of Anthropic’s latest funding round in February, the company had reached a market cap of $380 billion, up from roughly $20 billion when Rao became CFO. But who is Krishna Rao? Here is everything you need to know.

Who is Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao?

Krishna Rao joined Anthropic in May 2024 as the AI startup’s first chief financial officer. Before this, he was part of a private equity firm called Tidemark. As per his LinkedIn profile, Rao has served as CFO for two Silicon Valley companies – Cedar and Fanatics.

Krishna Rao became the CFO of Anthropic at a time when the AI startup had a run-rate revenue of around $250 million. Today, the company’s run-rate revenue stands at $30 billion, higher than OpenAI. Do note that at the time of his joining, Anthropic had not released Claude Code – its most successful AI tool.

Rao is said to have helped raise about $75 billion for Anthropic, taking charge of procuring and allocating compute, the large-scale computing power needed to train and run AI models.

In an episode of Invest in the Best podcast, Krishna stated, “Compute that we procure is the lifeblood of our business. It is the most important thing in the company. It is the canvas on which everything else gets built.”

Anthropic recently reached a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use the Colossus 1 supercomputer to power its AI models. Do note that Anthropic is rumoured to be preparing for an IPO soon, which may bring the company to a $1 trillion valuation.

Krishna Rao’s background and qualifications

As per a report from the Wall Street Journal, Krishna Rao grew up in the US, between St Paul, Minnesota, and Southern California. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 2005 with a degree in economics, then joined Bain & Company as a consultant after his court internship.

In 2011, he completed a law degree at Yale and joined Blackstone as a senior associate. As per reports, he was part of a $200 million investment deal in Crocs and became known for turning investment committee meetings into something like mock trials. This is when he got the nickname “Chairman Rao.”

In 2015, Krishna Rao joined Airbnb where he spent 6 years. As per reports, he turned down an offer from Uber to join Airbnb at the time. At Airbnb, Krishna served as the Global Head of Corporate & Business Development for 3 years. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Rao negotiated a $1 billion investment to keep Airbnb afloat.