Israeli Investors in Claude: Clal and Migdal Bet $225M on Anthropic
Clal and Migdal have committed more than $225 million to Anthropic, the maker of Claude, across two funding rounds. Migdal's original position is already up roughly $150 million on paper — a nearly 5.7x mark-up in ten months.
The two Israeli insurance giants — Clal and Migdal — have quietly become the country's largest direct investors in Anthropic, the maker of Claude. Combined commitments across two funding rounds exceed $225 million. Migdal's original position is already up roughly $150 million on paper.
The list of Israeli investors in Claude is short and concentrated. Only two names show up in disclosed primary funding rounds of Anthropic, the company behind Claude: Clal Insurance and Migdal Insurance. Both are among the largest insurance and pension groups in Israel. Together they have committed more than $225 million to the maker of Claude across two rounds — the first closed in September 2025, the second in May 2026.
Anthropic — the company behind Claude
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, both former senior executives at OpenAI. Dario served as OpenAI's Vice President of Research before leaving with a group of colleagues over disagreements with OpenAI's commercial direction. The Amodei siblings have Israeli origins — a detail regularly noted in the Israeli technology press when Anthropic's fundraising is covered.
The company's flagship product, Claude, is a large language model and chatbot competing directly with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. Anthropic also operates Claude Code, a developer-facing product that has become one of the fastest-growing revenue lines in enterprise software — over $500 million in annualized revenue, with usage up 10x in the three months preceding the September 2025 round.
Clal — $55 million at $183B, then $120 million more at $965B
September 2025. Clal Insurance committed $55 million to Anthropic's $13 billion round at a $183 billion valuation. The round was led by Iconiq Capital, Fidelity, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Insight Partners and the Qatar Investment Authority also participated. The story was broken by Calcalist's Sophie Shulman — read the original Calcalist reporting here and the English-language coverage at CTech.
Iconiq Capital is a San Francisco-based family office and private equity manager whose limited partners include several of the largest technology fortunes in the United States. It typically invests across real estate, infrastructure, and growth-stage technology. Clal accessed the Anthropic round through Iconiq and was asked to commit inside a matter of days — the raise was oversubscribed, moving from a $5 billion target to $10 billion to a final $13 billion on the strength of investor demand.
The check breakdown: the majority of Clal's $55 million came from policyholder savings — the retirement money of ordinary Israelis — with a smaller allocation from Nostro (Clal's own balance sheet). The deal was led internally by Avital Cohen, Head of Direct Investments, and Katya Zbar, Head of the Investment Funds branch, under Deputy CEO and Chief Investment Officer Barak Benski, who publicly confirmed the position.
Nine months later, Clal doubled the exposure. Calcalist reported Clal is committing an additional $120 million to Anthropic's current round — which closed at $65 billion raised at a $965 billion valuation, led by Altimeter Capital, Sequoia, Dragoneer, and GreenOaks. Blackstone, D.E. Shaw, and DST Global also joined.
Total Clal commitment to Anthropic across both rounds: $175 million.
Migdal — early entry at $170B, adding $50 million to the current round
Migdal Insurance — Israel's largest insurance and pension group by assets under management — entered Anthropic in 2025 at a $170 billion valuation, ahead of Clal's Iconiq round. TheMarker first reported Migdal's Anthropic position and its follow-on: Migdal is committing another $50 million in the $965 billion valuation round. That makes the current round Migdal's third Anthropic investment in under a year.
The math on Migdal's original 2025 position: entering at $170 billion with Anthropic now valued at $965 billion, the paper gain is roughly $150 million in approximately ten months — a mark-up of nearly 5.7x. Migdal's position was structured, like Clal's, primarily through policyholder pension money. Migdal is Israel's dominant pension provider; a meaningful share of Israeli private-sector retirement savings is now indirectly exposed to Anthropic's growth.
The Anthropic revenue backdrop
The valuations are not speculative. Anthropic's revenue has grown faster than any private technology company over the past twelve months, and the company's financial disclosures back the numbers.
The trajectory: $1 billion annualized run-rate at the start of 2025; $5 billion by August 2025; and a $14 billion run-rate reported by the company itself in early 2026. Q2 2026 revenue is expected to exceed $10.9 billion for the quarter alone — more than double Q1. Anthropic reported 300,000 business customers as of the Iconiq round.
The capital is not sitting idle. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has stated publicly that training a single frontier model can cost up to $10 billion, and industry rivals are spending at similar scale. In this environment, insurance capital that can commit at scale to a limited number of frontier AI companies has become a scarce and coveted resource.
Israel is the #1 per-capita user of Claude
Israel is the #1 per-capita user of Claude globally — 4.9x the world average, by Anthropic's own reported data. A country of under ten million people is the single most intensive user of the model on earth. The Judah Taub column in CTech's April 2026 analysis — which called Anthropic "the AI company worth more than Israel's GDP" — laid out the strategic implication: Israel's diaspora is embedded across Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and the venture funds financing them.
The Israeli institutional investors in Claude — Clal and Migdal — are betting on behavior their own domestic market already exhibits. Israeli engineers, security researchers, product managers, and startup founders default to Claude for code, cybersecurity work, and enterprise analysis — the categories where Israeli technical talent is most concentrated and where Claude's model quality is strongest.
The scoreboard
Combined disclosed commitments from Israeli institutional investors in Anthropic: more than $225 million across two rounds.
Migdal's paper gain on its original 2025 position: roughly $150 million in ten months, a nearly 5.7x mark-up.
Clal's follow-on commitment at more than triple the valuation it originally paid: $120 million.
Anthropic's valuation trajectory during the Israeli holding period: $170 billion → $183 billion → $965 billion in roughly a year.
Israeli policyholders — teachers, tech workers, IDF veterans, retirees — now own a slice of the model their country uses more intensively than any other. Israel picked Anthropic. Israel picked Claude. So far, Israel is winning the trade.
