Ode Acquires Casper Studios to Accelerate Enterprise AI Adoption With Anthropic's Claude

Anthropic's Ode buys the consultancy Casper Studios

Ode, the $1.5 billion company Anthropic set up with Blackstone to sell AI implementation, has acquired Casper Studios. It is the second consultancy Ode has absorbed since May, and the announcement gives no price. Ode, the enterprise AI company Anthropic set up with Blackstone, has bought an AI consultancy called Casper Studios. Casper helps companies put Claude to work inside software their staff already use, Ode said on Thursday. The announcement gives no price. It is the second consultancy Ode has absorbed in four months. The company Anthropic built to sell AI to enterprises is growing by buying the firms that already do it. What Ode is TNW covered the launch in July. Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman set Ode up as a $1.5 billion venture selling AI implementation rather than models. It sends small teams of senior engineers into large companies, works out where AI can help, then builds it. The approach is Claude-first, using Anthropic's models where they fit and rivals where they do not. The company runs on roughly 100 engineers, more than half of whom once founded startups. A Blackstone executive called them special forces rather than an army. That headcount predates the Casper deal. Ode itself was built on Fractional AI, an applied-AI boutique it acquired in May. Fractional ended an eleven-month partnership with OpenAI when that deal closed. Chief executive Chris Taylor told TechCrunch at launch that it was "pretty easy to imagine this as a trillion-dollar company someday if we execute well". What Casper adds Ode frames the two businesses as different ends of the same job. Ode builds custom systems for the hardest problems. Casper does the volume work: the skills, connectors and context inside Anthropic products that spread AI across an organisation. "CEOs have a long tail of AI engineering needs, and require a partner who can help them fully realize what frontier AI can do to accelerate their business," said Chris Taylor, Ode's chief executive, who came from Fractional. Jay Singh, Casper's chief executive and co-founder, said the two firms had "found common cause". He said Casper was built to help organisations adopt AI "quickly, effectively, and in a way that establishes real trust". Taylor said the teams had already worked together on several engagements before the deal. The one client with a number attached Ode names Sphera, an operational intelligence platform, as a recent shared client. Ode built a custom internal tool for part of Sphera's business that it says cut bottlenecks from time-intensive operational tasks by 70%. Casper separately automated processes across Sphera's customer support, consulting and project planning teams. The detail Ode chose to highlight is interoperability. Both firms built in the same Claude Code setup, so tools written by one team could be picked up by the other immediately. That is the argument for the acquisition, stated in a single example. Two consultancies that share a toolchain are worth more than two that do not. The investor list is doing two jobs Ode's backers are Anthropic, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman, plus Apollo Global Management, General Atlantic, GIC, Goldman Sachs, Leonard Green & Partners and Sequoia. Two of those names appear on the other side of Anthropic as well. Broadcom is in talks to raise more than $60bn in debt to finance AI chips for Anthropic, and Apollo and Blackstone are in discussions to take part. The same two firms are therefore financing the chips Anthropic trains on and owning part of the company that sells Anthropic's models to enterprises. Rodney Zemmel, an Ode board member and global head of the Blackstone Operating Team, supplied the third quote in the release. He said few firms could take a company from one custom build to AI running throughout the business. This is a bet against consultancies, made by buying them Ode's thesis is that implementation is where the money is. The incumbents in implementation are consultancies, and the market has been repricing them. TNW reported in June that Accenture had its worst stock day ever on fears AI was eating consulting, hours after it spent $4.18bn trying to escape that. Ode is buying the capability rather than building it. So is everyone else. TNW covered a similar move in May, when Exadel bought the London consultancy Tangent to bolt design onto its AI engineering line. Ode's named rivals include OpenAI's own version, The Deployment Company, alongside Deloitte and Accenture. Most enterprise AI pilots never reach production, which is the gap all of them are selling into. Anthropic is building the enterprise stack around this The acquisition sits inside a wider push. Anthropic built an inspection layer this month that lets enterprises block sensitive data before it reaches Claude, which is the sort of control a compliance department asks for before a rollout. Ode is the delivery arm of the same strategy. Casper widens it. Anthropic has also been signing Ode partnerships directly into software vendors. It announced tie-ups with the health platform PointClickCare on 13 August and the governance vendor LogicGate in July, both aimed at putting frontier models inside existing enterprise workflows. What is not disclosed Ode did not say what it paid for Casper. It did not say whether the deal was cash, equity or both. It did not say how many people Casper employs, how many clients it has, or whether its staff are joining Ode. Casper's revenue is not disclosed, and neither is Ode's. The Sphera figure of 70% is Ode's own. It describes one tool at one client, and no baseline is given for what the bottleneck cost before. Anthropic is not quoted in the release. Neither is Hellman & Friedman, nor any of the six other investors. The Information reported the deal separately, under the headline "Anthropic's Enterprise AI Venture Buys Consultancy". That story sits behind a paywall and nothing from it appears here.

Anthropic-Affiliated AI Services Company Ode Acquires Casper Studios

'CEOs have a long tail of AI engineering needs, and require a partner who can help them fully realize what frontier AI can do to accelerate their business,' Ode CEO and co-founder Chris Taylor said. Ode, the artificial intelligence services company Claude maker Anthropic formed with a $1.5 billion financial commitment that includes funding from leading finance firms, has bought a fellow AI services firm. San Francisco-based AI upstart Anthropic revealed back in May that it is building its own AI services company while also investing in its solution provider channel partner ecosystem. The AI services company acquired Fractional AI that same month. And in July, the services company revealed the name Ode with Anthropic and that Fractional's co-founders would lead Ode. Now, Ode has acquired Casper Studios to strengthen its capabilities around building skills, connectors and context within Anthropic products and unlock Claude within the systems teams already use. [RELATED: Anthropic Forms AI Services Company Amid Claude Partner Network Push] Ode With Anthropic Buys Casper Studios CRN has reached out to Anthropic and Ode for comment. Tony Olzak, chief technology officer at Irvine, Calif.-based solution provider Trace3 -- No. 36 on CRN's 2026 Solution Provider 500, a CRN 2026 MSP 500 honoree and partner of Anthropic -- told CRN in a recent interview that the vendor's products are critical for the solution provider's projects around enabling autonomous enterprises. Earlier this month, Trace3 revealed a strategic partnership with Anthropic around accelerating enterprise adoption of Claude and moving customers beyond AI experimentation by designing, deploying and scaling secure, governed AI products and services that deliver measurable business outcomes. The solution provider offers a framework called "Your Path to Claude with Trace3" that includes assessing where Claude generates the greatest value in a business. "We're hurtling toward a very aggressive progression through their partner program," Olzak said. Trace3 and Ode also share, notably, a relationship with financial services firm Apollo Global Management. The firm's Apollo Funds wing acquired Trace3 last year. And Apollo is one of the financial backers of Ode alongside groups including General Atlantic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, Leonard Green & Partners, Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC and Sequoia Capital. The Growing FDE Movement Microsoft, OpenAI, Salesforce and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are among the other channel-oriented vendors that have also made investments in these forward-deployed engineering (FDE) arms, positioning these teams as complementary to solution providers as opposed to taking away work performed by solution providers. Casper Studios CEO and co-founder Jay Singh and other members of the company are joining San Francisco-based Ode, Ode CEO and Fractional AI co-founder Chris Taylor said in a statement. Fellow Fractional co-founder Eddie Siegel serves as Ode's chief technology officer. "CEOs have a long tail of AI engineering needs, and require a partner who can help them fully realize what frontier AI can do to accelerate their business," Taylor said in a statement. "After collaborating with Jay's team on multiple engagements, we recognized a shared DNA and a commitment to overdelivering for the client. We're thrilled to have them under the Ode umbrella." Singh's company previously collaborated with Ode to help a shared client -- the Sphera operational intelligence platform -- reduce bottlenecks from time-intensive operational tasks by 70 percent, according to an Ode statement. Ode built a custom internal tool for the project and Casper Studios automated a variety of processes in customer support, consulting and project planning. What Is Casper Studios? Before the acquisition announcement, Casper Studios revealed in June that it had achieved Select Services Partner status in the Claude Partner Network, according to the company's website. The company has specialties in working with enterprises, financial services, healthcare, and media and entertainment. The company even has a Casper AI Chrome extension to help users summarize written content and a Yap AI voice-to-text product for turning spoken thoughts into podcasts. CEO Jay Singh founded Casper Studios in 2022 after about six years with LinkedIn, leaving with the title of manager of business development and strategic product partnerships, according to his LinkedIn account. At LinkedIn, Singh "helped lead the partnership with Clear to enable 200 million US members to access identity verification services" and "helped lead the partnership with Aadhar, DigiLocker, and Hyperverge to enable 100m Indian members to access identity verification," according to his LinkedIn account. He also helped "to build our verification products and framing the GenAI landscape for the company." "We started Casper as a curiosity," Singh said in a LinkedIn post announcing the acquisition. "We wanted to learn about AI and see how we can use the technology to help companies, people, and ourselves. It's since turned into something more. Our ambition has grown. And that is why we're being acquired by Ode!"

Anthropic-Backed Ode Acquires Casper Studios to Expand Corporate AI Deployments | PYMNTS.com

Casper helps companies put Anthropic's Claude to work inside the systems they already use. The company builds skills, connectors and context within Anthropic products to drive AI's impact across an organization, according to the release. Ode's acquisition of Casper will help Ode address additional opportunities for AI initiatives as it supports enterprises that are working to transform their business with AI, the release said. Ode and Casper have worked with shared clients in the past and found that they both built solutions in the same Claude Code setup and were able to instantly pick up and use each other's tools, per the release. "CEO's have a long tail of AI engineering needs and require a partner who can help them fully realize what frontier AI can do to accelerate their business," Ode with Anthropic CEO Chris Taylor said in the release. "After collaborating with [Casper Studios CEO and Co-Founder Jay Singh's] team on multiple engagements, we recognized a shared DNA and a commitment to overdelivering for the client. We're thrilled to have them under the Ode umbrella." Singh said in the release that both Casper and Ode help organizations adopt AI quickly, effectively and in a way that establishes trust. "We know we'll be able to do even more for our clients working with [Ode's] excellent and deeply technical team," Singh said. It was reported in May that Anthropic partnered with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and others to launch a new venture focused on helping enterprise companies embed the Claude AI model into their businesses. "Enterprise demand for Claude is significantly outpacing any single delivery model," Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said at the time in a press release. "Our partnerships with the world's leading systems integrators are central to how Claude reaches large enterprises. This new firm brings additional operating capability to the ecosystem and capital from leading alternative asset managers."