Anthropic announced Wednesday that it has acquired Vercept, an AI startup with deep roots to some of the biggest names in the Seattle tech scene. The acquisition is the latest following Anthropic’s acquisition in December, when Anthropic acquired the Bun coding agent module to help expand Claude Code.
Vercept has built tools for more complex agent tasks, including its Vy product, a cloud computing agent that could control a remote Apple MacBook. Vercept is one of many startups working to reimagine the personal computer for the age of artificial intelligence agents. As part of the deal, Anthropic will block the Vercept product on March 25.
The startup was a graduate of Seattle’s artificial intelligence incubator A12, which was born out of the long-running Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The co-founders of Vercept also had roots in the Allen Institute and were previously researchers there. One co-founder, Matt Deitke, made news last year as one of the AI researchers who negotiated a whopping $250 million salary from Meta to join its Superintelligence Lab. On Wednesday, Deitke congratulated his former colleagues in a post on X.
Vercept was a relatively well-known AI startup in the region. In a LinkedIn post announcing the Anthropic acquisition, Vercept CEO Kiana Ehsani said the startup had raised a total of $50 million. She identified Seth Bannon of A12, a board member, as the lead investor. Vercept previously announced that it had raised a $16 million seed round last January.
The list of angel investors was also impressive, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Cruise founder Kyle Vogt and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, GeekWire reported.
In Anthropic’s announcement of the acquisition, the company named co-founders Ehsani, Luca Weihs and Ross Girshick as part of the team joining Anthropic for the acquisition. However, not all of Vercept’s co-founders join the Claude creator.
Previously named as a co-founder of Vercept and an investor in the startup, Oren Etzioni is well known in Seattle as the founding leader of the Allen Institute for AI. Along with Deitke, he also doesn’t join Anthropic and was vocally less happy with the hiring of acqui. He wrote on LinkedIn: “After a little over a year, Vercept is throwing in the towel and giving its customers 30 days to leave the platform. Sad. A fantastic team is joining Anthropic. I wish them all the best!”
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Etzioni is also a professor at the University of Washington and known for other startups he founded and backed as a VC. He did not respond to a request for comment.
In Etzioni’s LinkedIn post, he accused Bannon, Vercept’s lead investor, of being “partially responsible” for Vercept not hiring the right marketers. A back-and-forth ensued between investors, with Bannon slamming Etzioni’s remarks: “… you belittled the heroic work of the founders to achieve a result that most can only dream of,” Bannon responded in a LinkedIn thread. They were also accused of less savory things like lying and legal threats.
While public spats between investors are entertaining and essentially pointless, the underlying motivation is remarkable. The stakes are high to build the next big AI winner, and now Anthropic will house a promising startup that has raised a decent-sized war chest.
While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Etzioni said he will get his money back. Anthropic clearly wanted these researchers (maybe – especially – with another one of them in the Meta).
Still, Etzioni told GeekWire that he remains angry. “I’m delighted to have received a positive return, but of course I’m disappointed that after just over a year with so much traction and such a fantastic team, we’re basically throwing in the towel,” he said.
However, the founders who joined Anthropic seem happy, according to CEO Ehsani’s LinkedIn post. “The choices were clear: we could build independently and work on the same vision as two separate versions of it, or join forces with an incredible team and accelerate that vision into reality. The decision became an easy one,” she said of joining Anthropic.