‘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!”
