Airbnb Veteran Krishna Rao Joins AI Startup Anthropic as CFO

Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic has appointed Airbnb veteran Krishna Rao as its chief financial officer (CFO).

In his new role, Rao will help shape Anthropic’s financial strategy and operations as the company grows and expands internationally, the company said in a Tuesday (May 21) press release.

“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,” Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, said in the release.

Rao joins the company from Fanatics Commerce, where he served as CFO, according to the release.

Before that, he led both the finance function and operational initiatives at healthcare payments and patient engagement platform Cedar, where he served as CFO, the release said.

At Airbnb, Rao helped navigate the company through the pandemic and played a key role in its initial public offering (IPO) and private financings while serving as global head of corporate and business development and as director of financial planning and analysis, per the release.

“I am thrilled to join Anthropic at such a pivotal moment in the company’s journey,” Rao said in the release. “Anthropic’s mission to build transformative AI systems that benefit humanity deeply resonates with me.”

In another recent addition, Anthropic said May 15 that Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined the firm as its chief product officer.

In that role, Krieger will oversee Anthropic’s product engineering, product management and product design efforts as the company works to expand its suite of enterprise applications and to bring its AI assistant, Claude, to a wider audience.

On May 13, Anthropic launched Claude in Europe, saying the web-based version claude.ai, the Claude iOS app and the subscription-based Claude Team plan are now available across the continent.

These offerings joined the Claude API that was launched in Europe earlier this year and allows developers to integrate Anthropic’s AI models into their own applications, websites or services.

In March, Amazon made an additional $2.75 billion investment in Anthropic that joined the $1.25 billion investment it made in September 2023 brought its total investment in the AI company to $4 billion.