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VCs will make billions on Anthropic’s IPO, but Amazon is set to make much (much) more
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- DeepHorus
Anthropic's forthcoming IPO could deliver billions to venture investors, but its S-1 shows the biggest financial winner may be Amazon. Menlo Ventures, Sequoia, Sound Ventures, and Spark Capital hold stakes expected to return billions. Yet none owns 5%, the threshold for the principal stockholders' table—an unusual feature for a major tech listing.
The reason is scale. At Anthropic's $965 billion private valuation, a 1% stake is worth nearly $10 billion. Menlo's roughly $14 billion position is therefore only about 1.5% of the company.
Amazon's advantage comes from convertible notes. It first backed Anthropic in 2023 with a commitment of up to $4 billion. According to the S-1, Amazon held notes with $6.2 billion in principal outstanding as of June 30—Anthropic's entire debt load. Amazon's filings valued those holdings at $97.9 billion.
The surging value forced Anthropic to record a $72.4 billion non-cash charge in the first half of 2026 under changes in fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities, and SAFEs. The notes could convert into up to 1.84 billion shares. A cap limits Amazon to 12% of Anthropic's partially diluted share count unless it waives the limit.
Amazon also invested $10 billion in nonvoting preferred stock in the second quarter, putting $5 billion into each of Anthropic's last two funding rounds. Combined with $8 billion in notes from 2023 through 2025, its total investment is about $18 billion. Anthropic has committed to spend at least $110 billion on AWS over 10 years.
Google also stands to gain: it held about 14% early last year and invested $10 billion more in April, though PitchBook's Harrison Rolfes estimates its current stake near 5.6%. It has secured at least $114 billion in cloud commitments through 2033. The S-1 warns cloud providers build rival models and may not always share Anthropic's priorities.
