Anthropic's multi-trillion price tag could reportedly shrink before IPO
The 8:30 Hosts Julie Hyman and Jake Conley are joined by Bullseye American Ingenuity Fund portfolio manager Adam Johnson to discuss Reuters' reporting that some Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) investors are considering lowering the company's valuation ahead of its IPO, reducing it from roughly $2 trillion to around $1.5 trillion.
seeing another headline coming out this morning out of Reuters reporting and this is more drip from the anthropic investor day that happened
Was that yesterday? Was it two days ago?
Two days ago.
Two days ago.
that some investors at that investor day were looking at a valuation for this company of 1.5 trillion at the IPO instead of the expected 2 trillion figure, which we've been talking about. There's been a lot of talk of we're going to match SpaceX or exceed it. We have all of this demand, we have all of this uh compute requirement that'll justify the 2 trillion.
This is the first time we're really seeing a hole kind of get put in that. And what's $500 billion between friends in the AI trade, but it does get to the point of you're trying to justify these huge valuations, do your numbers justify it?
Well, it also feels like a reading the room moment. Right. Right? Like we just had the Firmus IPO in Australia and there was the other one AirTrunk. Um both of those delayed or or you know, we'll see how indefinitely. Um the Aura uh IPO here in the US was postponed and we saw what happened.
Chat GBT.
Yeah.
Open API.
Yeah. I mean
Your OpenAI rather.
Yeah, right, of course, that delayed as well. And we've seen what's happened this week in the markets around the AI trade. We have also seen, and this is something that we've talked about, um if you look at the latest numbers from Ramp, the expense management company that tracks a lot of this, spending on tokens is or token pricing rather, um and spending on token tokens has slowed down. So all of this would seem to indicate that there's at least enough concern out there that you're not going to go out and try and overprice.
Right. Well and coming off that ramp data, we got the revenue numbers from Anthropic out of that investor day leaked from I was Reuters or Bloomberg that showed yes, growth is still growing. It's still very hot, but it is decelerating or it looks to be decelerating.
Right. I mean we don't know if it's going to re-accelerate in the fourth quarter because the whole point of ARR is allegedly is that like it's lumpy and so you want to smooth it out.
You smooth out the bumps. But this is I I made this argument yesterday and I'm Adam, I'm hoping you'll enjoy this.
Like an like an ARR, that's not a real number. Or this uh, you know, what was the other one we were talking about, the uh Net retention. Net retention revenue, revenue retention. These aren't give me some GAAP numbers.
Yeah.