Meet Ode: The $1.5 Billion Company Anthropic Built to Put Its AI to Work Inside Your Business

Key points

• Ode, a joint venture backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs, launched in May 2025 with $1.5 billion in backing.
• The company employs 100 engineers who work inside client businesses to build custom AI systems.
• Ode acquired Fractional AI, an AI engineering startup that previously held an 11-month partnership with OpenAI.
• Ode operates on a "Claude-first" principle, meaning it defaults to Anthropic's Claude AI model but can use rival products if needed.
• Chris Taylor, Ode's CEO, told TechCrunch he believes the company could eventually become worth a trillion dollars.

Most businesses know they are supposed to do something with AI. Few know exactly what, or how. That gap is where Anthropic sees a business opportunity worth billions.

Anthropic, the San Francisco company behind the Claude family of AI models (large language models, the technology that powers chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT), has co-founded a new company called Ode. The venture launched in May 2025 with $1.5 billion in funding from private equity firms Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs, among others.

Ode's job is straightforward: send skilled engineers directly into companies, figure out which parts of their operations AI can genuinely improve, and then build the systems to make it happen.

The idea came from Blackstone, which had tried using large consulting firms and smaller specialist agencies to roll out AI across the businesses it owns. One small agency, a startup called Fractional AI, stood out. Ode acquired Fractional shortly after launch, and its two co-founders now run Ode. Fractional ended its previous partnership with OpenAI when the deal closed.

For ordinary employees at companies that hire Ode, this means a small team of outside engineers arriving to redesign specific workflows using AI tools, such as a customer service process or an internal reporting system. The goal is working software, not a slide deck.

What does this mean for businesses that want to adopt AI?

It means specialist help is becoming a formal, funded industry. Most companies lack the internal talent to build serious AI systems from scratch. Ode is essentially a staffing and engineering service for that exact problem, one with heavyweight financial backing and a direct line to Anthropic's own technical team.

Ode currently has 100 engineers. More than half are former startup founders, a profile the company values because building something from nothing teaches a kind of end-to-end judgment that pure engineering roles rarely do.

Ode's chief technologist, Eddie Siegel, put it plainly: picking the right AI model matters less than most people assume. "It's one ingredient in a system that has to be engineered," he said. The company defaults to Anthropic's Claude but will use other AI products where they fit better.

Ode competes directly with OpenAI's own implementation business, called The Deployment Company, as well as consulting giants like Deloitte and Accenture, both of which have built similar teams.

Taylor is candid about the challenge ahead. Finding enough engineers who combine technical depth, business judgment and startup experience is genuinely hard. Growing fast without sacrificing quality is the central problem the company has to solve.

For now, Ode's private equity backers will point their own portfolio companies toward the service first. But Ode will sell to any business willing to commit at the level Ode requires: CEO-level buy-in and a willingness to rethink core processes, not just add a chatbot to a website.