Anthropic absorbed Seattle AI startup Vercept less than two years after its founding, shutting down the company's flagship product to acquire its engineering team in one of the fastest startup exits in recent Pacific Northwest tech history.
The deal announced Wednesday folds Vercept's technology and an unspecified number of employees into Anthropic's Claude division, according to GeekWire. Vercept's desktop application Vy will be discontinued on March 25, giving customers 30 days to migrate away from the platform.
Founded in 2024 by former Allen Institute for AI researchers, Vercept had raised a $16 million seed round in January 2025 that valued the company at $67 million post-money. The startup attracted more than $50 million total from high-profile investors including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean.
Despite the substantial funding and elite technical team, Vercept never launched a commercial product before being acquired. The company developed Vy as a cloud-based computer-use agent capable of operating remote Apple MacBooks to complete multi-step tasks through natural language instructions.
Anthropic stated the acquisition will advance Claude's "computer use" capabilities, enabling the AI to complete complex tasks inside live applications like dealing with spreadsheets and managing workflows across multiple tools. In its official announcement, Anthropic noted that Claude Sonnet 4.6 now achieves 72.5% accuracy on OSWorld computer use evaluations, up from under 15% in late 2024.
Vercept co-founders Kiana Ehsani, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick will join Anthropic as part of the deal. The team had previously worked at the Allen Institute for AI on robotics and embodied AI projects before launching their startup.
One notable absence is co-founder Matt Deitke, who left Vercept in mid-2025 after Meta reportedly offered him a $250 million compensation package to join its Superintelligence Lab. That earlier talent poaching foreshadowed the intense competition for elite AI researchers that ultimately led to Vercept's rapid acquisition.
Seattle AI veteran Oren Etzioni, a Vercept co-founder and early investor, described the outcome as "sad" while praising the team joining Anthropic.
"I'm pleased to have gotten a positive return but obviously disappointed that after just a little over a year with so much traction, and such a fantastic team, we're basically throwing in the towel," Etzioni told GeekWire.
The acquisition represents Anthropic's second strategic purchase following its December acquisition of coding agent engine Bun. Both deals focus on acquiring specialized engineering teams rather than commercial products, reflecting Silicon Valley's current approach to talent acquisition in the competitive AI market.
Vercept operated in a crowded field where OpenAI recently hired Peter Steinberger, creator of the viral OpenClaw automation tool. Other major players include Google's Project Mariner, Amazon's Nova Act, and Microsoft's Copilot automation features for Windows.
