Investors in AI giant Anthropic believe it could float at a valuation of $2 trillion or more in October, making its initial public offering (IPO) by far the largest in history, the Financial Times has reported.
Half a dozen investors told the paper that they expect the Claude developer’s reportedly rapidly rising revenue would allow it to debut at more than double its current valuation in the autumn.
Going public at this valuation could dwarf even SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion IPO from June, which raised $75 billion and was three times larger than the previous record holder of Saudi Aramco.
It would also generate huge profits for early investors in Anthropic. However, public markets are growing increasingly wary of heavy investment in the AI sector, with major selloffs of related companies in exchanges including the Nasdaq and Kospi in recent months. A second IPO of this size within six months of SpaceX’s debut could prove a test of appetites for the ongoing AI boom.
Backers of the company told the FT that they believe the rapidly growing demand for the company’s models and tools justifies their expectations. Some investors reportedly expect the company’s annualised revenue to reach between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of 2026 using its internal metric of extrapolating full-year sales from a one-month snapshot.
“If Anthropic is growing 800 per cent a year, you’d think at the incredibly low end they would trade at 30 times [revenue],” one investor in the group told the FT. “That would make them a $3tn company.”
There are currently no publicly traded companies with the same focus on enterprise AI in the US, but revenue multiples of 50 times are not uncommon among tech companies, and SpaceX began trading at a valuation of 90 times annual revenue with an IPO that was around three times oversubscribed.
Anthropic declined to comment when approached by the FT, and several investors told the paper that senior executives at the company had yet to fix their own valuation target for the IPO even in private conversations.
Yesterday, Bloomberg revelated that Anthropic is in talks to buy the Nvidia-backed startup Decart AI in a deal worth around $6 billion to help it handle growing demand ahead of its IPO. Decart develops AI infrastructure and optimisation technology alongside its own models, and it is expected that it could help the larger company absorb more demand ahead of its IPO.
