Anthropic has hired Airbnb Veteran Krishna Rao to be its CFO.
Takeaway Points
- Anthropic has hired Airbnb veteran Krishna Rao to be its CFO.
- Krishna has served as CFO at Fanatics Commerce and at Cedar, a healthcare payments and patient engagement platform.
- On May 15, 2024, Anthropic hired Mike Krieger to be its Chief Product Officer.
Why did Anthrpoic hire Krishna Rao?
Anthropic, the AI safety and research company, announced on Tuesday that it has hired Krishna Rao to be their Chief Financial Officer. With almost 20 years of experience as a strategic finance leader for world-class brands and as an investor, Krishna will play a crucial role in shaping Anthropic’s financial strategy and operations, the company stated.
Krishna Rao, the new CFO of Anthropic, said in a comment that he is happy to join Anthropic and that he is looking forward to working with the teams.
“I am thrilled to join Anthropic at such a pivotal moment in the company’s journey. Anthropic’s mission to build transformative AI systems that benefit humanity deeply resonates with me. I look forward to working with the exceptional team at Anthropic to build a strong financial foundation that will support the responsible development and deployment of our technology,” said Krishna.
Daniela Amodei, co-founder and President of Anthropic said that “Krishna is a world-class financial leader with an impressive history of driving strategic growth and operational excellence at innovative, mission-driven companies. As we continue to grow our footprint and expand our impact, Krishna’s deep expertise in financial strategy and analysis, capital allocation, and scaling high-growth organizations will be essential. We’re thrilled to have him join our leadership team and help guide Anthropic through our next phase of growth.”
About Krishna
Krishna has served as CFO at Fanatics Commerce and at Cedar, a healthcare payments and patient engagement platform. Krishna led both the finance function and operational initiatives as the company’s CFO. He served as Global Head of Corporate & Business Development and led Corporate and Operations FP&A at Airbnb, where he helped navigate the company through the COVID-19 pandemic and played a key role in raising over $10 billion in equity and debt capital, including Airbnb’s IPO and private financings, the company stated.
Earlier in his career, Krishna spent time as a private equity investor at Blackstone and as a strategy consultant at Bain & Company. With a J.D. from Yale Law School and an A.B. in economics from Harvard College, Anthropic said.
About Anthropic
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company based in San Francisco. Anthropic aims to build systems that people can rely on and generate research about the opportunities and risks of AI. Anthropic is a team of researchers, engineers, policy experts, and operational leaders with experience spanning a variety of disciplines, all working together to build reliable and understandable AI systems.
On May 15, 2024, the company reported in a blog that it had hired Mike Krieger to be its Chief Product Officer. According to the report, Mike will oversee Anthropic’s product engineering, product management, and product design efforts.
Mike said in a comment, “I’ve long admired Anthropic’s relentless focus on building capable and trustworthy AI systems that empower humans and expand what’s possible with technology. I’m thrilled to join the exceptional team at Anthropic and partner with them to design and scale transformative products like Claude. The potential for AI to positively impact the world is immense, and I believe Anthropic has the talent, principles, and technology to help realize that potential.”
Mike was most notably the co-founder and CTO of Instagram; during his tenure, he grew the engineering team to over 450 people and helped scale the platform to more than a billion users, Anthropic stated.
