Anthropic announced Wednesday that it has acquired Vercept, an AI startup with deep roots among the big names in Seattle’s tech scene. The acquisition is the latest since Anthropic acquired coding agent engine Bun in December to help expand Claude Code.
Vercept had been creating tools for more complex agent tasks, such as Vy, a computer-based agent product in the cloud that could operate remote Apple MacBooks. Vercept is one of many startups working to reimagine personal computers for the age of AI agents. As part of the deal, Anthropic will discontinue Vercept’s products on March 25th.
The startup is an alumnus of Seattle’s AI-focused incubator A12, which grew out of the longtime Allen Institute for AI. Vercept’s co-founder also has roots in the Allen Institute and was previously a researcher there. One of its co-founders, Matt Deitke, was in the news last year as one of the AI researchers who negotiated a whopping $250 million fee from Meta to join Meta’s Superintelligence Institute. On Wednesday, Deitke congratulated his former colleague in a post about X.
Vercept was a relatively well-known AI startup in the region. In a LinkedIn post announcing the acquisition by Anthropic, Vercept CEO Kiana Ehsani said the startup had raised a total of $50 million. She named A12 board member Seth Bannon as the lead investor. Vercept previously announced that it had raised a $16 million seed round in January last year.
The list of angel investors is 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 acquisition announcement, the company named co-founders Ehsani, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick as part of the team participating in the acquisition. However, not all Vercept co-founders will join Claude Maker.
Oren Etzioni is a former Vercept co-founder and investor in the startup, and is best known in Seattle as the founding leader of the Allen Institute for AI. Like Deitke, he was not involved with Anthropic and was vocally not too happy about the acquisition. He posted on LinkedIn: “Now, a little over a year later, Vercept is giving customers 30 days to exit the platform. Sad. We have a great team joining Anthropic. We wish them all the best!”
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Etzioni is also a professor at the University of Washington and is known for other startups he has founded and supported as a VC. He did not respond to requests for comment.
In a post on LinkedIn, Etzioni blamed Bannon, Vercept’s largest investor, for being “partly responsible” for Vercept’s failure to hire the right business people. A back-and-forth between investors ensued, with Bannon criticizing Etzioni’s comments, with Bannon replying in a LinkedIn string: “…you disrespected the heroic work of founders who achieved results that most people can only dream of.” They also accused each other of less unpleasant things, such as lies and legal threats.
While the public fights between investors are funny and essentially pointless, their underlying motivations are noteworthy. The stakes are high for building the next big AI winner, and now promising startups that have raised the right size war chest will be pushed into Anthropic.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Etzioni said it paid for itself. Anthropic clearly wanted these researchers (along with perhaps – especially – another meta researcher).
Still, Etzioni told GeekWire he’s still depressed. “It’s nice to get a positive return, but obviously it’s disappointing that after just over a year with so much traction and such a great team, we’re basically throwing in the towel,” he said.
But CEO Ehsani’s LinkedIn post suggests the founders are happy to have joined Anthropic. “The choice was clear: I could build independently and work towards the same vision as two different versions, or I could work with an amazing team to accelerate the realization of that vision. The decision was easy,” she said of joining Anthropic.
