Eric Schmidt owns about 1% of Anthropic ahead of its IPO, according to Bloomberg

Eric Schmidt, who was Google's chief executive, owns roughly 1% of Anthropic PBC, the company that develops the Claude assistant, according to a report Bloomberg published on Monday, October 19. The news agency attributes this to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to discuss private matters. That stake puts him in line for one of the largest individual gains from the company's IPO. According to the same people, Schmidt put tens of millions of dollars into Anthropic's Series A, one of its first funding rounds, and it is not clear whether he has sold any of his shares since then. Neither he nor Anthropic wished to comment.

Schmidt, who is now 71, made his first investment in 2021, when Anthropic was worth $461 million, according to the data company PitchBook. Last week, investors put its fair value at between $1.8 trillion and $2 trillion; the top end is more than 4,300 times what it was at that Series A. At a $2 trillion valuation, his net worth would grow by roughly a third, to almost $80 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Even at Anthropic's latest valuation of $965 billion, the stake would add almost $10 billion to the $57.5 billion he has now.

Over the past fifteen years, Schmidt has invested in technology through several vehicles, such as TomorrowVentures, Innovation Endeavors and his family office, Hillspire, which PitchBook links to hundreds of venture capital investments. He began with consumer internet, software and financial technology, and has lately turned to artificial intelligence: besides Anthropic, he is in World Labs, Reflection AI and Mistral AI. If Anthropic goes public at a $2 trillion value, this bet will top Innovation Endeavors' stake in Uber, which it took in 2011; by the time Uber listed in 2019, the company's value had multiplied about 1,400 times, to $82 billion.

Anthropic wants to start officially presenting the offering to investors from the week of November 9, sources told Bloomberg earlier this month, which would let it start trading before the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States; it is expected to debut by the end of the year at the latest. Its IPO will also make many employees and investors rich: after the latest round, each of its seven co-founders is already worth $8 billion, and all seven appear on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Its major shareholders include Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia and Microsoft, which have put in billions. In May, Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, with more than $2 billion each, led a $65 billion round that, for the first time, valued Anthropic above its rival OpenAI.