Anthropic Files for it's IPO: Founders Keep 50.1% Voting Rights

0:00 Anthropic has officially filed their S1 for their Nasdaq IPO. The stock ticker is going to be Ant, A -N -T. In this filing, a lot of really wild things appear. One is that they made $16 .29 billion. in first half revenue. They have an $80 .7 billion net loss and a single founder share has 50 .1 % of the vote. There's a lot going on. We're going to break down the entire Anthropic S1. This could be one of the biggest IPOs of all time in all history. So we're going to break that down today on the show. Before we do, I wanted to mention, if you want to try all the latest models from Anthropic or from OpenAI or from any of the AI... companies, I would love for you to check out my startup, which is AI box .ai. On AI box, we let you access over

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1:15 playground that you can talk to and you can say, hey, I want to make this or that. And typically it's just been generating text, audio, video, image, music with AI models. Now you're actually able to make rich files, things like PowerPoints, things like documents. If you want to go check that out, the new update that we've made, go check out AIbox .ai. It's only $8 .99 to get started. You get every AI model and it is an incredible workstation for whatever you do with AI. All right, let's talk about what's going on with Anthropic here. So they just filed their Form S -1 registration statement with the SEC.

1:46 This is going to be their big IPO. The number of shares and the price range haven't actually been set yet. And I think this registration statement is also not yet effective. So no shares can be sold until the SEC basically approves it and allows them to. Anthropic submitted a confidential draft on the 1st of June. So we're now all the way in October, almost in November, apparently.

2:11 Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading a syndicate of more than 20 underwriters on this deal. So there is a lot of people that are working on this. A lot of people won the IPO. They're going to just pick Goldman Sachs. They're just going to pick Morgan Stanley. They're putting them both. It feels like they're pitting them against each other. But there's a lot of other people in this syndicate of underwriters. The revenue ramp in this filing was really shocking to me. It feels very steep. $41 million in 2023.

2:35 And then. $386 million in 2024, and then $4 .59 billion in 2025, and then $16 .29 billion in the first half of 2026 alone. So you could say, well, if they never grew at all, then that would be over $30 billion. But we know their growth rate has been really incredible. So just in the first six months, if it was 16, billion, I think we're going to see a really massive uptick. Anthropic is describing their business uptake of basically everyone using Claude as, quote, the fastest enterprise adoption of any technology in history, which I guess enterprise is the key word in there because the fastest adoption, I think ChatGPT is going to be winning this or OpenAI is going to be winning this with ChatGPT if it's just

3:17 general purpose. But enterprise adoption, I mean, Anthropic really might have that cornered. And to be fair, that's where the money is, right? The enterprise is obviously going to spend way more money than OpenAI is. So this is a very valuable company to have. With all of this, the net loss, like I mentioned, was... $80 .7 billion, and that includes about $72 .4 billion in non cash fair value charges. The operating loss was $693 million. Anthropic has committed to spend over $450 billion on cloud computing. with Amazon and Google, and there's a bunch of other suppliers and investors that they're going to be spending this on. So they had massive commitments of $450 billion plus. They already lost $80 billion

4:01 as their net loss. And the revenue was $16 billion. I mean, we don't know exactly. I think I've seen some estimates that their revenue run rate is like, you know, what's it going to make in the next 12 months is like $80 billion. That's impressive, but they still have $450 billion in commitments for cloud compute. So they have a lot of money that's going to need to be spent to build up infrastructure. Now, what I will say is there's a couple different parts of that. Part of that is literally just paying Amazon or Google or, you know, they pay SpaceX a billion dollars a month for their Colossus data center compute.

4:33 So they have to pay a lot of those type of deals. But I think that they're probably going to be spending money as well, like OpenAI and like SpaceX and others on, you know, meta on building out their own data centers and their own infrastructure. A single class F share held by seven co -founders is the thing that a lot of people were kind of shocked by. So a single class F share that was held by seven of the co -founder carries 50 .1 % of the voting power, which basically makes Anthropic a controlled company under NASDAQ rules.

5:01 We've seen similar things, right? When Zuckerberg went public with Meta, he had super voting. abilities where basically he can make the final say on all of the company's decisions and in fact there is they needed to raise a bunch of money so the reason why this is important because this is what is happening with meta today is going to happen with anthropic in the future based off of how they've set that up so i'll just explain what's happening with meta today they just launched a 35 billion dollar stock offering and the reason is because they need to fund their ai infrastructure push so Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, all of them are apparently interested up to about $5 billion of that. And there's going to be a separate $60

5:36 billion class C share sale that's planned for next year. So they're going to sell $35 billion now and they have Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom that are going to buy $5 billion. You can imagine all of those companies are going to be suppliers to Meta. So Nvidia is like, look, we'll throw a couple billion dollars in. But they're going to do a stock offering. So they're putting this out on the market. 35 billion is what they're trying to raise now the problem was zuckerberg up until this point always had super voting rights and the amount of stocks when they ipo'd uh that went out they you know zuckerberg was able to always control remain in control of the company so When they needed to do this huge build out

6:12 for AI, we know that Meta is spending aggressively on data centers and they have the number one app on the App Store I'm using right now. So they're finally getting the consumer adoption that they always wanted, but it's so insanely expensive for many reasons. The researchers, the data, the data centers, all of it. They need to spend a lot of money. They're spending 35 now and $60 billion next year. So that's 95.

6:34 billion, right? So they're going to spend $100 billion in this stock offering and what they have planned next year. But that would dilute Zuckerberg. And in fact, it would dilute him so much that he wouldn't have complete control of the company. And so there was a lot of negotiations that recently happened, and they got finally finalized and approved by the meta board, which essentially keep Zuckerberg in control of the company, even if he's selling some of these shares and quote, unquote, diluting himself, they've created a new class of share, which will continue to give him voting rights and control of the company. And something very similar is happening with Anthropic here because I'm trying to remember

7:09 the exact numbers of how much the founders of Anthropic have, but they don't have a huge chunk of this company. They don't own 50 .1 % of the company. I think the founders, they might own like, you know, maybe like, I think Dario might own like 5 % of Anthropic or something small like that. They bring so much money. They've all been diluted so much. However... they have created this new class of share, the class F share that has 50 % of the voting power. So 50 .1%. So basically they're like, look, we're going to go public. We're going to raise a ton of money.

7:37 We're going to keep. complete control of the company. And by complete control, I will also say it's the seven founders. Those seven founders still have to agree. It's not like in Meta's case, Zuckerberg, he's kind of like Emperor Zuck, as he's famously known as. He makes all the decisions. And sometimes that's good. Sometimes that's bad.

7:53 Sometimes he spends, you know, tens of billions of dollars a year on the Metaverse that goes absolutely nowhere. And I guess he could argue that, well, maybe that technology got put into the Meta Ray -Ban glasses and that's the new direction of the company. But ultimately, Reality Labs got shuttered or took a big back burner to the big metaverse vision that he had that never really materialized. So he spent tens of billions of dollars on that. And he was ultimately the one that can make all the decisions. Now, he also was the one that had the guts to say, or I guess the voting shares and the guts to say, look, Meta is going to invest aggressively into AI. And perhaps you could argue that's the

8:26 reason why Meta is doing so well in the stock market today. And they're staying so relevant is because of making this big push into the future. And he's going to capture a lot of that. So I think both things can be true. So Zuckerberg definitely takes big swings. Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don't. But this is exactly what Anthropic is trying to do in this same situation.

8:43 They're trying to remain with over 50 % of the voting shares and keep control of the company. Apparently, the customer disclosure shows that they have depth and a lot of concentration in what they're doing. As of September, they had more than 11 ,900 customers that generated at least $100 ,000 in trailing 12 -month revenue.

9:01 So they have more than 1 ,900 that generated at least $1 million, and they have about 250 that generated at least $10 million. You can think of who these 250 is. This is the Fortune 250, right? The top companies are spending over $10 million in anthropic compute. Net revenue retention was about $900 ,000. and trailing 12 month revenue per employee was more than 6 .6 million. So for every employee to have over Anthropic, they're making over $6 .6 million a year. And that sounds incredibly profitable. That's up from 1 .4 million, by the way, a year earlier.

9:34 Roughly one -fifth of revenue came from two customers, which I will also say is pretty wild. It kind of always works like that with the 80 -20 rule, but it's pretty wild that all the revenue is coming from two customers. You could probably imagine. Those customers could be anyone like Microsoft or Amazon. I would probably guess Amazon is one of those two customers. Public investors, once they go public, would buy class A shares, which carry one voting share, a single class F share, which is issued to an LLC owned by the seven co -founders, is now going to have that 50%. So they're going to do it like normal, right?

10:09 They're going to sell all the shares. Everyone that's buying a class A share is going to get a vote. However, no matter how many shares they sell, 50 % is always going to be owned by this LLC that the co -founders all own. It's a separate class that's been elected by the long -term benefit trust. So Anthropic kind of has this funny structure.

10:28 They have this long -term quote -unquote benefit trust, and it has, you know, five financially disinterested trustees. They control a majority of board seats. And this structure right now is going to make Anthropic basically a controlled company, according to NASDAQ's rules, although they expect to only use the exemption. covering its nomination and governance committee. So there's only some things they're going to be using it for. Anthropic contributed about 846 million non -voting shares. That's about 5 % fully diluted shares as of June 30th to the public benefit fund subsidiary. So there's all sorts of different subsidiaries and things going on. This is also coming at a time when there's a little bit of

11:08 drama with the U .S. government. But this is going to be an absolutely colossal IPO. It's going to be fascinating to see what happens here. I'll keep you guys up to date on how much they raise and everything going on there. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. It has been an absolute pleasure. If you enjoyed this episode, it would help the show out so much if you could leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. And as always, make sure you go check out AIbox .ai. We just pushed out a big, huge update that allows you to create all sorts of incredible, all sorts of incredible.

11:35 assets for your business with over 100 different AI models. You can chat with them all in the same thread, all in the same playground. We'd love for you to try it out. All right. Catch you guys all in the next episode.