Dan J. Berger

Anthropic files for IPO. But who is poised to get the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇 Investors will be sharing nearly $1 TRILLION of proceeds on ~$142b invested. A ~6.5x blended multiple on a huge amount of capital, in just 5 years. 🤯 Note: all those numbers assume a $1.5 trillion IPO valuation. So let’s dive in 🔎 1) The craziest fact: no VC in the Series A or Series B 🤯 The $124m Series A in May-21 was led by Jaan Tallinn (Skype’s co-founder), with Dustin Moskovitz and Eric Schmidt. It is likely to return ~345x the original capital, or ~$43b to those early angels. Mind-boggling. The $982m Series B in 2022 was led by... SBF and FTX: it will return ~79x the capital invested. FTX’s $500m would be worth ~$39b today. Plot twist: the estate sold it for ~$1.3b in 2024, in one of the worst trades ever. 2) The first VCs in: Spark and Menlo are killing it 🏆 Spark will make over $10b from its Anthropic investments. They first came into the 2023 Series C and are making ~79x their investment in that round. They followed in every single round since, investing $777m in total, now worth ~$11b. Menlo led the Jan-24 Series D and will make ~30x its money on that round. And finally, Lightspeed’s Series E lead will make ~16x in 18 months. 3) The real winners in $ terms: the strategics 💰 Amazon put a grand total of ~$18b in, mostly via convertible notes converting at ~$2 a share, against $58.90 for the Series H investors. That gives Amazon ~21% of the company, worth ~$310b. That’s ~17x its investment. 💵 Google is not that far behind: its notes and the $10b it put in this April alone will be worth ~$83b. And that’s before the compute: Anthropic has committed $110b+ to AWS and $111b to Google Cloud. They are both investors and suppliers, so they win twice. 4) Founders and team: incredible outcome, and giving most of it away 🙏 The seven co-founders hold ~240m shares each. That’s ~$21b per person, or ~$150b combined. 👏 And each of them has pledged 80% of it to philanthropy. So ~$120b will be going to good causes. On top of that, Anthropic put 5% of the company (~$75b) into its own Public Benefit Fund. And the IPO will mint a huge number of UHNW in the team: they will share ~$355b worth of shares, options and RSUs. Perhaps the biggest and fastest employee wealth creation event in history. Congrats to Dario, Daniela and everyone involved. Legendary. 👏