Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s 1% Anthropic stake set to pay massive windfall

Former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt owns around 1% of Anthropic PBC thanks to his early investment in the startup, according to people familiar with the matter, positioning him for one of the largest individual windfalls from the company’s imminent public market debut.Schmidt invested tens of millions of dollars in Anthropic’s Series A funding round, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorised to discuss private matters. It is unclear whether he has sold any part of his stake since the initial investment.Also Read: OpenAI seeks to accelerate fundraising ahead of Anthropic IPO: ReportSchmidt and Anthropic declined to comment.Anthropic’s highly anticipated IPO is set to generate massive windfalls for its employees and investors. The startup’s seven co-founders are already worth $8 billion each based on its last funding round, fortunes that propelled them onto the Bloomberg Billionaires Index of the world’s 500 richest people.When Schmidt, 71, made his first bet on Anthropic in 2021, it was valued at $461 million, according to data company PitchBook.

Investors indicated last week that a fair valuation for the company would be in the range of $1.8 trillion to $2 trillion. The upper end of that range would value Anthropic at more than 4,300 times its Series A valuation.At that valuation, the Anthropic stake would boost Schmidt’s net worth by about one-third to nearly $80 billion, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index. Even using Anthropic’s most recent valuation of $965 billion, Schmidt’s stake would add nearly $10 billion to his existing fortune of $57.5 billion.Schmidt has become a prolific technology investor over the past decade and a half, investing through several platforms, including TomorrowVentures, Innovation Endeavors and his Hillspire family office, which PitchBook associates with hundreds of venture capital investments.His early portfolio focused on consumer internet, software and financial technology, but artificial intelligence has become a major focus more recently, with investments in Mistral AI, Reflection AI and World Labs, as well as Anthropic.If Anthropic’s shares debut at a valuation of $2 trillion, Schmidt’s investment in the company would outperform Innovation Endeavors’ own early bet on Uber Technologies Inc. in 2011.

By the time Uber went public in 2019, its valuation had increased about 1,400-fold to $82 billion.Anthropic is set to begin formally marketing its initial public offering as early as the week of November 9, putting it on track to begin trading before the US Thanksgiving holiday, people familiar with the matter said earlier this month. The company is expected to make its debut no later than the end of the year.Also Read: Anthropic commits 5% of its stock to a new 'public benefit' fundThe startup’s other major backers include Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Nvidia Corp. and Microsoft Corp., which have all invested billions in the maker of the Claude chatbot. Venture capital firms Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital also each invested more than $2 billion in the company when they led a $65 billion funding round in May that pushed Anthropic’s valuation above that of rival OpenAI for the first time.The company expects to match or exceed the size of SpaceX’s record-setting $1.77 trillion IPO in June, people familiar with the matter have said.