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.

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