Anthropic launched the roadshow for its public offering yesterday and named a price range with it: 825 million Class A shares at $70.00 to $78.00. Of those, 801,351,354 come from the company and 23,648,646 from existing stockholders, and Anthropic earns nothing on that second batch. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley also get a 30-day option on a further 123,750,000 shares. The stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT.
Compared with the version withdrawn a day earlier, that is 42 million fewer shares and two dollars less at the top. The range got narrower, not higher.
The calendar is set
Pricing lands on November 18, trading starts November 19, according to CNBC sources with knowledge of the details. At the top of the range the offering brings in up to $64.35 billion, and Anthropic would be worth up to $1.405 trillion on a fully diluted basis. Its May funding round valued it at $965 billion.
Retail investors get an unusual share
About 20 percent of the shares are meant for retail investors. The typical figure is 5 to 10 percent. Anthropic has also opened a separate retail tranche in Australia. Institutional demand is stronger than it was for SpaceX at this point in the process, CNBC reports, and the book is already covered across the $70 to $78 range.
Seven chip and cloud companies buy in alongside
Running parallel to the offering, AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia, and TSMC are buying $26 billion of Class N common stock at the IPO price in a private placement. Those shares are not registered and carry no lock-up. Nvidia alone plans about $10 billion immediately after the listing, according to the prospectus — roughly a tenth of all the new cash Anthropic raises this month. TSMC adds up to $500 million, Reuters reports.
The seven co-founders are selling $1.75 billion between them, about $250 million each at the midpoint of the range. That leaves each of them worth around $18 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. And the revenue run rate stood at $81 billion on October 31, up $10 billion from the end of September.
The market changed a week ago
Four weeks ago the talk was of a $2 trillion valuation. Last week Anthropic’s own investors called $1.5 trillion a “stretch” to CNBC. Now up to $1.405 trillion is on paper, after the midterm message and in front of an audience that now prices data-centre debt differently than it did in the summer. That the book is covered before the roadshow properly begins says more about demand than any of the numbers that circulated beforehand.
Sources
- Anthropic: Anthropic launches roadshow for proposed initial public offering
- CNBC: Anthropic sets IPO price range of $70 to $78, looks to start trading Nov. 19
- Bloomberg: Anthropic Founders to Cash Out $1.75 Billion in Blockbuster IPO
- New York Times: With Its Giant I.P.O., Anthropic Ties Itself Closer to Nvidia
- Reuters: TSMC to invest up to $1 billion in Anthropic, OpenAI