Amazon, not venture capital firms, may be the biggest winner of Anthropic's IPO
In the initial public offering of AI company Anthropic, Amazon is likely to be the largest financial beneficiary. Venture capital firms' stakes are small in percentage terms, though they may be worth billions of dollars.
When AI company Anthropic goes public, several venture capital firms could earn billions of dollars, but tech giant Amazon is likely to gain the most. That emerges from Anthropic's S-1, the registration filing submitted to the US securities regulator ahead of a share offering. According to TechCrunch's reading of the document, no venture firm owns 5% of the company, so none appears in the principal stockholders' table.
Venture stakes are small in percentage terms
That is unusual: in a typical tech IPO, lead venture investors hold double-digit percentage stakes. Anthropic's private valuation is $965 billion, so a 1% stake is worth almost $10 billion. Menlo Ventures' position of roughly $14 billion, for example, amounts to only about 1.5% of the company, citing Bloomberg figures. Sequoia, Sound Ventures and Spark Capital are also among the firms expected to see billions in returns.
Amazon's convertible notes
Amazon first backed Anthropic in 2023, committing to invest up to $4 billion. Much of its investment took the form of convertible notes, a debt instrument that converts into shares upon an IPO or sale. According to the S-1, Amazon's notes had $6.2 billion in principal outstanding as of June 30, which is Anthropic's entire debt load. Amazon's own filings valued the holding at $97.9 billion. On Anthropic's income statement, the resulting fair-value adjustment totaled $72.4 billion for the first half of 2026; it is a non-cash charge.
The notes could convert into as many as 1.84 billion shares, but Amazon is capped at 12% of Anthropic's partially diluted share count. Amazon can waive the cap. Notes that cannot convert will stay outstanding and convert in later quarters.
Amazon also invested $10 billion in nonvoting preferred stock in the second quarter, $5 billion in each of the last two funding rounds. Its total investment comes to about $18 billion. In addition, Anthropic has committed to spend at least $110 billion on AWS, Amazon's cloud unit, over ten years.
Google's position
Google is also set for a windfall. Court filings showed it held about 14% of Anthropic early last year, and it invested a further $10 billion in April. PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes estimates its current stake at closer to 5.6%. Google has secured at least $114 billion in cloud commitments through 2033. The S-1 also warns that some cloud providers build rival AI models and may not always want the same things as Anthropic.
