Anthropic IPO to drive Bblockbuster gains for Iconiq, Spark, GIC- Moneycontrol.com

Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC also owns about 1% of Anthropic after investing more than $4.5 billion in the company, beginning with its first investment last year.

When Iconiq first invested in Anthropic PBC in 2025, the artificial intelligence company was valued at $183 billion. It was already worth more than almost any other technology startup in the world and was quickly becoming a major force in AI. Even so, Iconiq's investment, made at a later stage in the company's growth, is now expected to bring in huge profits as Anthropic prepares to enter the stock market.

The investment firm has put more than $6 billion into Anthropic. Its stake is now worth about $17 billion, based on the AI company's latest private-market valuation of $965 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. This is the largest investment deal in Iconiq's history. Its stake could double in value if Anthropic goes public at a valuation of as much as $2 trillion, as some people expect.

Anthropic's expected stock market listing could bring billions of dollars in gains to major venture capital firms, technology companies and individual investors who have supported the maker of the Claude chatbot since it was founded in 2021. The winners include investors who backed the company early, as well as those who invested later and benefited from its rapid growth and rising value over the past year.

Spark Capital, the only venture capital firm known to have a seat on Anthropic's board, invested $75 million in the company in 2023, one person said. It was the largest investment check the firm had ever written. That stake is now worth $7 billion at Anthropic's current valuation, the person said. Sound Ventures, a little-known investment firm founded by talent manager Guy Oseary and actor Ashton Kutcher, invested $35 million in the same funding round, when Anthropic was valued at $5 billion, another person said. Since then, Sound Ventures has invested another $400 million across later funding rounds, building a stake now worth billions of dollars, the person said. Oseary and managing partner Effie Epstein now run the firm. Kutcher stepped down earlier this year.

Sequoia Capital, a well-known venture capital firm that made early investments in OpenAI, did not make its first investment in Anthropic until the beginning of this year. But it has invested $3 billion in the startup, giving it a stake of about 1%, according to a person familiar with the matter. That investment could bring Sequoia a large return.

Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC also owns about 1% of Anthropic after investing more than $4.5 billion in the company, starting with its first investment last year, one person said. The person, like the others who shared this information, spoke anonymously because the details are not public. In August, Anthropic formed a strategic partnership with GIC and Macquarie Asset Management to build data centers.

Anthropic, Sequoia, Iconiq, Sound Ventures and GIC declined to comment. Spark Capital did not respond to a request for comment. The Wall Street Journal had earlier reported some details about Spark's returns.

Anthropic is expected to publicly file the paperwork for its initial public offering (IPO) in the coming days. This would begin the process of selling its shares on the stock market and could create an extraordinary amount of wealth. The listing could increase the wealth of its seven billionaire co-founders and turn many of the company's thousands of employees into millionaires. The gains could also spread across the technology and venture capital industries, helping fund future AI investments at a time when more people are worried that the AI boom could be a bubble.

Like its main rival, OpenAI, Anthropic has raised money from many sources to pay for expensive investments in computer chips, data centers and skilled workers. These investments help the company build better AI models and support the growing use of its technology. Some of Anthropic's biggest suppliers, including Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Nvidia Corp., have invested billions of dollars in the startup. These deals have raised concerns that companies are funding one another in ways that could help keep the AI boom going. The deals are also expected to bring large gains to these major technology companies.

In its early days, Anthropic mainly received money from wealthy individual investors, including former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced co-founder of FTX. Bloomberg News has reported that Schmidt owns about 1% of Anthropic. This could make him one of the individual shareholders who gains the most from the company's stock market listing.