Early Anthropic investors face a billion-dollar decision
Yahoo Finance Executive Editor and Sozzi Unleashed host Brian Sozzi explains which well-known investors could make a lot of money when Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) starts selling its shares to the public through an initial public offering (IPO). He looks at who might sell their shares to make money, who might keep them in hopes of making even more money later, and how these choices could affect Anthropic's future.
Anthropic might release its IPO prospectus today. This is a document that gives investors important information about the company before it sells shares to the public. A source who knows about the situation told me that Anthropic is now in its quiet period, when companies limit what they say publicly before an IPO.
That means we probably will not hear much from Anthropic's executives right now. I think the company could file its S-1 document later today. That is the official document companies submit when preparing to go public. But this is only my personal guess, based on my feeling about the situation.
Even if the filing does not happen today, it will probably happen within the next few weeks. After that, Anthropic will likely start selling shares to the public around the middle of November, or perhaps toward the end of November.
But the IPO is coming, and many people who invested in Anthropic when it was still young could make enormous amounts of money. One of those investors is someone I know quite well and who has appeared on this program before.
That person is Mark Benioff. He invested in Anthropic fairly early. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, a major software company.
As an early Anthropic investor, Benioff could make tens of billions of dollars from the IPO. Ashton Kutcher's venture capital firm, which invests money in young companies, also invested in Anthropic early on.
Many famous and important investors have money in Anthropic. Here is what interests me most: I want to see what happens early next year when these investors have the chance to benefit from their investments.
Depending on how Anthropic's IPO goes, the money these investors could make might become one of the big business stories at the start of next year. Will the people who invested early keep their Anthropic shares because they believe the company will succeed over many years?
We have mostly seen that kind of loyalty with SpaceX. I would argue that we have not seen huge numbers of SpaceX investors rushing to sell their shares. The people who believe in the company have stayed with it. They trust Elon Musk and believe in SpaceX's future.
I want to see whether investors show the same confidence in Anthropic's leaders, Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela Amodei. If they do not, that could create serious problems for Anthropic during the first half of next year.
We could see early investors selling large amounts of Anthropic stock. Some might want to get money ready before a possible OpenAI IPO, or they might have other reasons for selling. Ideally, Anthropic's early investors would keep their shares for months, or even years, after the company goes public.
Here are some of the early investors who could make a lot of money. They include Iconiq, GC, Sequoia, a long-established venture capital firm, and Menlo Ventures, another experienced venture capital firm like Sequoia. Spark Capital also invested $75 million. These investors are probably very excited for Anthropic's IPO to happen.