Anthropic has officially launched Ode, a $1.5B joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs that deploys AI engineers directly to customer offices. The move follows OpenAI’s similar venture, The Deployment Company, underscoring a growing recognition that model quality alone isn’t enough to win enterprise business.
Ode was originally conceived by Blackstone, which noticed a gap when large consulting firms and small AI boutiques struggled to implement AI across its portfolio companies. The joint venture acquired Fractional AI, an AI engineering services startup.
“It’s pretty easy to imagine this as a trillion-dollar company someday if we execute well,” Chris Taylor, CEO of Ode and Fractional co-founder, told TechCrunch. Ode currently employs 100 engineers and works closely with Anthropic’s applied AI team to create tailored systems for each client.
An ideal customer, according to Taylor, is one whose CEO buys into the promise: “It’s the most important product feature that the company is going to build over the next two years.”
