WASHINGTON – Former Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt owns around 1% of Anthropic thanks to his early investment in the start-up, according to sources familiar with the matter, setting him up for one of the largest individual windfalls from the company’s imminent public market debut.
Schmidt invested tens of millions of dollars in Anthropic’s Series A fundraising round, according to the sources, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorised to discuss private matters.
It is unclear if he has sold any part of his stake since the initial investment.
Schmidt and Anthropic declined to comment.
Anthropic’s highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO) is set to generate massive windfalls for its employees and investors.
The start-up’s seven co-founders are already worth US$8 billion (S$10.2 billion) each based on its last funding round, fortunes that propelled them onto the Bloomberg Billionaires Index of the world’s 500 richest people.
When Schmidt, 71, made his first bet on Anthropic in 2021, it was valued at US$461 million, according to data company Pitchbook.
Investors indicated earlier in October that a fair valuation for the company is in the US$1.8 trillion to US$2 trillion ballpark; the high end of that range would value Anthropic at more than 4,300 times its Series A funding round.
At that value, the Anthropic stake would boost Schmidt’s net worth by about one-third to nearly US$80 billion, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index.
Even using Anthropic’s most recent valuation of US$965 billion, Schmidt adds nearly US$10 billion to his existing fortune of US$57.5 billion.
Schmidt has become a prolific technology investor over the past decade and a half, across several investment platforms including TomorrowVentures, Innovation Endeavors and his Hillspire family office, which Pitchbook associates with hundreds of different venture capital bets.
His early portfolio focused on consumer internet, software and financial technology, but more recently artificial intelligence has been a major focus, with investments in Mistral AI, Reflection AI and World Labs, as well as Anthropic.
If Anthropic’s public stock debuts at a US$2 trillion value, his bet on the company would beat Innovation Endeavors’ own early bet on Uber Technologies in 2011.
By the time that company went public in 2019, its value had increased about 1,400-fold to US$82 billion.
Anthropic is set to begin formally marketing its IPO as soon as the week of Nov 9, putting it in line to begin trading before the US Thanksgiving holiday, sources familiar with the matter said earlier in October.
It is expected to make its debut no later than the end of 2026.
The start-up’s major backers include Alphabet, Amazon.com, Nvidia and Microsoft, which have all poured billions into the Claude chatbot maker.
Venture firms Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital also each put more than US$2 billion into the company when they led a US$65 billion funding round in May that tipped Anthropic’s valuation higher than its rival OpenAI for the first time.
The company – whose other backers include Menlo Ventures and Spark Capital – expects to match or beat the size of SpaceX’s record-setting US$1.77 trillion June IPO, sources familiar have said. BLOOMBERG
