Abstract:
According to Bloomberg, people familiar with the matter said
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (Eric Schmidt) holds about 1% of the company’s shares due to his early investment in the AI startup Anthropic.
As Anthropic approaches its IPO, he is expected to be one of the individual investors who stand to gain the most from the company's listing.
Schmidt
Schmitt invested tens of millions of dollars in Anthropic’s Series A round of financing, people familiar with the matter said. It's unclear whether Schmidt has sold any shares since his initial investment.
Anthropic's highly anticipated IPO is expected to bring significant wealth to the company's employees and investors. According to the valuation of the company's last round of financing, the seven co-founders are currently worth US$8 billion each. This wealth has also made them one of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, becoming one of the 500 richest people in the world.
When Schmidt, 71, first invested in Anthropic in 2021, the company was valued at $461 million, according to data firm PitchBook. Investors said last week that the company's fair valuation was between $1.8 trillion and $2 trillion; at the upper end of that range, Anthropic would be valued at more than 4,300 times its Series A funding round.
Based on this valuation,
Schmitt's Anthropic shares would increase his net worth by about one-third, to nearly $80 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Even at Anthropic's most recent valuation of $965 billion, Schmidt's fortune would increase by nearly $10 billion from the current $57.5 billion.Over the past 15 years, Schmidt has become a prolific technology investor, operating through multiple investment platforms, including Tomorrow Ventures, Innovation Endeavors and his family office Hillspire. PitchBook data shows Hillspire has ties to hundreds of different venture capital investments.
Schmidt’s early investment portfolio was mainly focused on consumer Internet, software and financial technology, but in recent years, AI has become its investment focus. AI companies he has invested in include Mistral AI, Reflection AI, World Labs and Anthropic.
If Anthropic is valued at $2 trillion when it goes public, Schmidt's return on his investment in the company will exceed Innovation Endeavors' early investment in Uber in 2011. When Uber went public in 2019, the company's valuation had increased approximately 1,400 times to $82 billion.
Informed sources revealed earlier this month that Anthropic will officially launch an IPO road show as soon as the week of November 9, and plans to start trading before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. The company expects to go public by the end of this year at the latest.
Other major investors in the startup include Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia and Microsoft. These companies have invested billions of dollars in Claude chatbot developers. Venture capital firms Altimeter Capital, Dragoon, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital each also invested more than $2 billion in Anthropic in a round of financing led in May this year. The funding round amounted to US$65 billion, making Anthropic's valuation surpass that of rival OpenAI for the first time, reaching US$965 billion.
Informed sources previously revealed that the size of Anthropic’s IPO is expected to reach or exceed the record set by SpaceX in June. SpaceX's IPO valuation at the time was as high as $1.77 trillion.
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