Bloomberg compiled Anthropic's pre-IPO shareholder list: Spark Capital's $75 million investment has a book value of about $7 billion

In Silicon Valley's history, there has never been a shortage of wealth-creation myths. From the birth of Apple to the rise of Google, venture capitalists (VC) bet millions of dollars on future giants and ultimately reaped hundredfold or thousandfold returns.

As the IPO process of large-model giant Anthropic enters its countdown, Bloomberg has compiled an extremely detailed list of the company's shareholders. This list can be called one of the most exaggerated wealth-creation events in Silicon Valley history. It not only demonstrates the jaw-dropping speed of wealth expansion in the AI era, but also thoroughly tears open the intricate, even somewhat surreal capital web behind the large-model arms race.

Crazy returns: windfall profits across cycles

The first thing that makes people dizzy is the paper gains of those who entered early.

In 2023, venture capital firm Spark Capital made the largest bet in its history: investing $75 million in the then newly founded Anthropic, which had almost no revenue. Three years later today, according to the latest private-market valuation, the stake held by Spark Capital has soared to about $7 billion. A return rate of nearly 100x has made that $75 million one of the greatest "home runs" in venture capital history. More importantly, Spark Capital is also currently the only known venture capital firm with a seat on Anthropic's board, which gives them an unparalleled information advantage and decision-making voice.

Equally precise was Menlo Ventures. They began approaching Anthropic in 2023, when the latter was still struggling to catch up with OpenAI and had almost no revenue; when leading the Series D in 2024, Menlo Ventures made a large bet of $750 million, with cumulative investment exceeding $1 billion, and now that stake is worth about $14 billion.

Even Sound Ventures, co-founded by Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher, got a piece of the pie. They invested $35 million in 2023 when Anthropic was valued at only $5 billion, then continued to add until $400 million, and now this asset has also swelled to the scale of several billion dollars.

In the AI era, the speed of monetizing insight has surpassed any period in the history of human business. A bet that seemed crazy in 2023 became the most brilliant record in an institution's history three years later.

The mutation of the capital game: from "building unicorns" to "trillion-dollar behemoths"

What is truly shocking is not the sudden wealth of early investors, but that late entrants can still make a fortune.

Among this shareholder list, the most eye-catching is Iconiq. This institution did not first invest in Anthropic until 2025, when the latter's valuation had already reached an extremely exaggerated $183 billion—in the venture capital world of the past, this was already an astronomical figure, usually regarded as a company's "ceiling."

However, in the AI track, the ceiling is only the floor. Iconiq has invested more than $6 billion in total, and based on the latest private valuation of $965 billion, its stake is worth about $17 billion. If Anthropic's IPO really reaches $2 trillion as the market expects, Iconiq's investment will double again and become the largest single return in its history.

Sequoia Capital is another one that "bought in at a high position" but still made a big profit. As a top venture capital firm that has invested in OpenAI, Sequoia did not spend $3 billion until the beginning of this year to take about 1% of Anthropic. Now, this portion of equity is worth nearly $10 billion. Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC made a similar move, investing more than $4.5 billion in total for about 1% of the shares. In August this year, Anthropic also established a strategic cooperation with GIC and Macquarie Asset Management to jointly build data centers, upgrading financial investment into a deep industrial bundling.

This reveals an extremely cold reality: artificial intelligence has turned venture capital into a capital arms race in which only a very small number of top players can participate. The venture capital legends of the past turned millions of dollars into a unicorn valued at $1 billion; the rule of the game now is that you must first raise tens of billions of dollars, then bet on whether it can become the next trillion-dollar company. Missing the window to enter early does not mean you are out; but if you are not prepared with a multi-billion-dollar checkbook, you do not even qualify to sit at the table.

Silicon Valley's "circular alchemy": both supplier and rent collector

In addition to VCs, behind Anthropic also stand the most powerful giants in today's tech world: Google, Amazon and Nvidia.

In this shareholder list, their roles are extremely complex and thought-provoking. They are both Anthropic's key infrastructure suppliers, providing it with expensive chips and cloud computing power; at the same time, they are also the company's largest equity investors.

This is an extremely exquisite "circular financing" model.

Take Amazon and Google as examples. They inject huge amounts of cash into Anthropic through investment—Amazon has committed up to $33 billion, and Google up to $40 billion; and Anthropic turns around and uses this money to buy Amazon's AWS services or Google's cloud computing power, and has committed to purchasing more than $100 billion in cloud services from AWS over the next decade and locking in $200 billion in computing power from Google Cloud. In this process, the giants not only earn part of the money by "selling computing power," but also by continuously pushing up Anthropic valuation, earning an extremely terrifying premium on its equity investment.

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The afterimage of an era: from SBF to Schmidt, a cross-boundary carnival

Amid this extremely formal and dazzling shareholder list are mixed a few highly dramatic names.

The most lamentable is FTX founder SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried). In Anthropic's Series B investor list, his name appears prominently. In 2022, this cryptocurrency maniac, who was imprisoned for a shocking fraud case, led Anthropic's Series B through Alameda Research, investing $500 million for about 8% equity when the valuation was only $2.5 billion. After FTX collapsed, this equity was sold by the bankruptcy liquidators for about $1.3 billion in 2024. If FTX had not collapsed, this investment would have become his ultimate trump card for a comeback; now it can only be a coveted asset in the bankruptcy liquidation.

Another interesting investor is former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. As early as 2021, he invested tens of millions of dollars in the Series A and holds about 1% of Anthropic's shares through his family office Hillspire and platforms such as TomorrowVentures and Innovation Endeavors, which will soon make him one of the individual investors with the highest returns. An old man who once helmed the previous generation of tech giants used his personal funds to buy a ticket aboard the next generation's tech overlord.

Conclusion: the ultimate realization of paper wealth and the critical point of the bubble

According to Bloomberg, this IPO will not only make Anthropic's seven billionaire co-founders even richer, but is also likely to directly create thousands of millionaire employees, completely changing the wealth landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area and even global tech talent.

The most thought-provoking point is this: when the entire market is still fiercely debating "whether AI is actually a huge bubble," the top institutions truly at the table are already prepared to welcome this unprecedented paper return. For early capital, whether it is a bubble no longer matters; as long as the IPO can successfully ring the bell, they will have completed the thrilling leap from "paper wealth" to "real wealth."

Anthropic plans to push forward with an IPO in the coming weeks, and the market is even hotly discussing that its valuation could reach as high as $2 trillion. If that comes true, the return records created by Silicon Valley VCs over the past few decades will be completely rewritten.

However, the cost of this wealth-creation myth is increasingly high thresholds, increasingly concentrated capital, and an increasingly unsettling circular financing structure. When these venture capitalists cash out and leave the secondary market, what they leave to public market investors will be a trillion-dollar behemoth that needs to swallow massive computing bills, face extremely fierce price wars, and has not yet fully proven its profitability. In fiscal year 2025, Anthropic's revenue was about $4.6 billion, but computing power and infrastructure spending reached $7.3 billion, and its operating loss expanded from $2.98 billion in 2024 to $8.06 billion—computing costs have reached 1.6 times revenue.

Silicon Valley's wealth-creation machine is still roaring, but this time, the ordinary people left at the table may only be able to become spectators paying the final bill for this capital feast.