Backed by private equity and banking giants, it will build custom AI systems for business bottlenecks
There’s gold in midmarket IT spend, and Anthropic - backed by private equity and banking heavyweights and tapping its Claude Partner Network - is coming for it.
Anthropic and a group of investors are launching a standalone AI-native enterprise services firm for mid-sized companies to build custom Claude-powered systems for core business operations, with the new outfit set to join its Claude Partner Network.
“Companies from community banks to mid-sized manufacturers and regional health systems stand to gain from AI, but lack the in-house resources to build and run frontier deployments,” Anthropic said in a press release.
To give them the expertise, the AI model maker said its Applied AI engineers will work alongside the new firm’s engineers to understand customers’ operations, identify where Claude can help, and build custom systems.
Anthropic did not reply to an email requesting comment.
“There are some really strong reasons to focus on the midmarket,” Shari Lava, IDC’s group vice president of AI, data, and automation, told The Register. “First of all, there is just the sheer number of midmarket companies … Second, midmarket companies tend to act more nimbly – they have to in order to compete effectively. They also tend to have more streamlined decision-making, greater cooperation in the executive ranks, and less risk aversion, all while often having less technical debt.”
Lava agreed with Anthropic that they also tend to lack the in-house skills to tackle large AI projects, and they don’t get much attention from large, enterprise-focused vendors, meaning they are a greenfield for Anthropic.
“While most work with multiple hyperscalers and SaaS companies, most of the projects have little support from the vendor directly, meaning partners are key to any deal,” she told The Register. “Midmarket offers faster sales cycles and higher willingness to pay for custom integration than fragmented SMBs, while being less locked into big vendor ecosystems than enterprises.”
Gary McConnell, CEO of VirtuIT, a national solution provider that is focused on midmarket customers, said Anthropic is presenting partners with a “huge opportunity” to win services business by addressing the under-adoption of AI among those customers in that middle tier.
“Ultimately, I think it's a huge opportunity,” he said. “The idea of that is not to do more with less, it's to do more with more. So when you see these models get plugged in and they're able to generate more data, and that data being generated needs to be backed up, and the backup pools grow, and the storage grows, and it needs to sit on either a local or cloud compute. There are just so many consultative elements that the opportunity of AI brings to the equation.”
McConnell said VirtuIT is exploring partnership deals with several AI companies, including Anthropic. He said the largest pool of customers for Anthropic’s services is likely going to come from its financial backers.
To fund the standalone services company, Anthropic has partnered with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs. McConnell sees this as a way for Anthropic to quickly get early wins under its belt.
“They have the portfolio companies that fall under these large conglomerates that generate sales pipeline for them,” he said. “If you're a portfolio company owned by Goldman Sachs, you will not be running on OpenAI's platform. It's as simple as that.”
Anthropic’s willingness to build bespoke software for customers seems to fuel the SaaS-pocalypse narrative that has developed around AI tools' displacement of large legacy IT platforms. While Lava said this deal could push around some small to mid-size SaaS vendors if it is well executed, it may complement the larger SaaS providers by introducing agentic workflows to the midmarket.
“I think it could put pressure on SaaS players, and even other legacy applications outside of cloud. Especially for app providers outside of core enterprise apps like ERP or CRM in the short term,” she said. “It’s risky to move core apps, but there are many other applications in mid-size companies, many of which a company starts to outgrow quickly in midmarket, such as expense apps, PM tools, marketing apps, etc.”
McConnell said there is an appetite inside the midmarket for novel approaches to software management that Anthropic can exploit.
"I think over time, they're going to be able to continue to show business value for organizations and say, 'Hey, you don't need this legacy CRM, that hasn't been touched in the manufacturing industry in 30 years. We can build this for you pretty cheaply, with tools you're already using,'" McConnell said. ®