Anthropic is reportedly close to raising a fresh financing round that would value the AI startup at about $17 billion, signaling sustained investor appetite for foundational model builders and safety-focused AI ventures. Concurrently, Heizen—an AI infrastructure startup—closed a $500,000 pre-seed round to develop prototypes and expand its team, reflecting active early-stage funding for efficiency and tooling plays. The combined activity highlights continued capital flow into both large-scale model developers and niche infrastructure providers, driven by enterprise interest and the need to scale compute and deployment capabilities across industries.