Anthropic and Blackstone Launch $1.5B AI Implementation Company

AI models are becoming increasingly capable, but the path to enterprise adoption remains uncertain. To shape this future, labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have established separate businesses focused on deploying AI engineers to customers' offices. This approach is based on the bet that assisting businesses in figuring out how to use their AI models is the next trillion-dollar category.

One of these businesses now has a name: Ode, the $1.5 billion AI implementation company launched by Anthropic in May as a joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and others. This move follows OpenAI's own take on this, The Deployment Company, highlighting a growing recognition among frontier AI labs that winning enterprise customers requires more than just shipping better models. Ode was originally conceived by Blackstone, which identified a gap when it engaged large consulting firms and small AI services boutiques to implement AI across its portfolio companies.

One of those boutiques, AI engineering services startup Fractional AI, stood out and was acquired shortly after the joint venture was announced. Fractional has become the foundation of Ode, a kind of "scaled boutique" AI services firm. Its leaders have ambitious goals.

"It's pretty easy to imagine this as a trillion-dollar company someday if we execute well," Chris Taylor, CEO of Ode and co-founder of Fractional, told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. "The key challenge of the business is how do you go through that phase of hyper growth without losing the emphasis on quality?" Ode currently employs 100 engineers and works closely with Anthropic's applied AI team to identify where the tech can have an impact on different businesses and create systems tailored to each organization's operations. Anthropic's internal team will continue to focus on strategic, mission-aligned deployments, a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The private equity firms backing Ode will funnel their own portfolio companies to the joint venture as potential customers, though Ode will not limit sales of its services to those companies. For Ode, an ideal customer is one whose CEO buys into the promise, according to Taylor. "A lot of the work that we're doing is the top one or two priority for the CEO of the company," Taylor said.

"It's the most important product feature that the company is going to build over the course of the next two years, or it's reworking the most important business process they have." Ode will operate under a "Claude-first" principle, meaning it will implement Anthropic's technology, including features like Claude Tag in Slack, whenever possible. The company isn't limited to Anthropic's technology, though, and will use rival AI products if needed. Eddie Siegel, Ode's chief technologist and a Fractional co-founder, says the venture's secret sauce is its quality of implementation and the ability to build custom solutions for business problems.