When Anthropic goes public, venture capital firms like Menlo Ventures, Sequoia, Sound Ventures and Spark Capital are set to make billions. But according to Anthropic’s S-1 filing, none of them will come close to the biggest winner of the IPO: Amazon.
Anthropic (Credits: TechCrunch)
The reason is scale. Anthropic’s private valuation has reached a staggering $965 billion, so even a small percentage stake is worth a fortune. At that valuation, a 1% stake is worth nearly $10 billion — meaning Menlo’s roughly $14 billion position amounts to only about 1.5% of the company, according to Bloomberg figures cited by TechCrunch.
Why No VC Firm Owns 5% of Anthropic
Remarkably, none of Anthropic’s venture backers owns 5% of the company — the threshold for inclusion in the principal stockholders’ table of an S-1. In a typical tech IPO, lead venture investors hold double-digit-percentage stakes. Anthropic’s sheer size has diluted even its earliest and largest backers below that line, even as their positions are worth billions in absolute terms.
Strategic partners, by contrast, bought in far bigger. Amazon first backed Anthropic in 2023 with a commitment to invest up to $4 billion, and has since poured billions more into the AI company — structuring much of its investment as convertible notes, debt that converts into shares upon an IPO or sale.
Amazon’s $97.9 Billion Note Position
According to the S-1, Amazon holds convertible notes with $6.2 billion in principal outstanding as of June 30 — the entirety of Anthropic’s debt load. But as Anthropic’s valuation soared across successive funding rounds, those notes became far more valuable: Amazon’s own filings valued its note holdings at $97.9 billion as of June 30.
The surge forced Anthropic to record a $72.4 billion non-cash charge in the first half of 2026 for the change in fair value of its convertible notes and related liabilities — money that never left the company, but a striking measure of how much Amazon’s position has grown.
Amazon’s notes could convert into as many as 1.84 billion shares, though a cap limits it to 12% of Anthropic’s partially diluted share count — a cap Amazon can waive, with unconverted notes converting in later quarters.
Amazon’s Total Anthropic Bet: About $18 Billion
The notes are only part of the picture. Amazon also invested $10 billion in nonvoting preferred stock in the second quarter — $5 billion in each of Anthropic’s last two funding rounds — bringing its total investment to about $18 billion when combined with the $8 billion it put into the notes from 2023 through 2025.
And the payoff extends beyond the stock itself: Anthropic has committed to spend at least $110 billion on AWS over the next 10 years. Google, meanwhile, is also set for a major windfall, holding an estimated 5.6% stake after investing $10 billion in April, plus at least $114 billion in cloud deals of its own.
For the VCs, Anthropic’s IPO will still be a career-defining win. But the filing makes one thing clear: the company that stands to gain the most from the AI lab’s public debut is the e-commerce and cloud giant that bet biggest, earliest, and in the most structured way.
Also Read: When Will Anthropic Go Public? IPO Timeline Points to November Roadshow and Listing Before Thanksgiving | CoreWeave and AI Stocks Rise as Anthropic IPO Filing Restores Faith in Sustained AI Spending
Source: TechCrunch AI — read the full story there.
