Anthropic makes first acquisition with purchase of Bun to accelerate Claude Code
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic PBC today announced it had made its first acquisition in acquiring developer tools startup Bun for an undisclosed price.
Founded in 2019, Bun offers an all-in-one JavaScript/TypeScript toolkit that aims to simplify and accelerate full-stack development. The company's offering is similar in purpose to Node.js but also includes tools developers usually pull in separately, including a package manager, a bundler, a test runner and script runner, all shipped as a single executable.
Bun is built using the Zig programming language and leverages Apple's JavaScriptCore under the hood to yield much faster startup times and lower memory usage compared with runtimes based on the V8 engine, the engine used by Node.js and others. Bun is often significantly faster in key developer workflows, such as package installation, build/bundling, test execution and runtime, making it appealing to Anthropic.
The tools provided by Bun are broadly compatible with existing Node.js code and support many Node core application programming interfaces, such as file system, path and networking, along with resolving modules that work in a way similar to Node's module resolution. Bun could be described as a super charged version of Node.js.
For Anthropic, the acquisition will result in faster performance, improved stability and new capabilities for those using Claude Code, Anthropic's coding support model.
Enhancing Claude Code is key to the acquisition, as Bun has been key in helping scale the infrastructure used by Claude Code throughout its evolution.
"Bun represents exactly the kind of technical excellence we want to bring into Anthropic," said Mike Krieger, chief product officer of Anthropic, in an announcement post. "Claude Code reached $1 billion in run-rate revenue in only 6 months and bringing the Bun team into Anthropic means we can build the infrastructure to compound that momentum and keep pace with the exponential growth in AI adoption."
While Bun may be Anthropic's first acquisition, it won't be its last, with Anthropic noting that the acquisition was in line with its "strategic, disciplined approach to acquisitions" and that the company "will continue to pursue opportunities that bolster our technical excellence, reinforce our strength as the leader in enterprise AI and most importantly, align with our principles and mission.
Coming into the acquisition, Bun had raised a single seed round of $7 million in 2022 from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Johannes Schickling.