Anthropic 股權結構沿革：風投遲來入場，卻帶來盡可能多的資金

If all goes to plan, Dario Amodei and his Anthropic co-founders will ring the NASDAQ bell next month to mark the company’s IPO. Their celebration will no doubt be greeted with the traditional high-fiving and back-patting from venture capitalists.

But the story of Anthropic’s rise from a small group of OpenAI defectors to an industry-leading juggernaut, poised for what will likely be the largest IPO of all time, is a far messier narrative than we normally get in Silicon Valley.

For years, VC firms passed on backing Anthropic, fearing its unusual structure and fixation on safety over commercialization made it a bad bet. Today no venture firm owns more than 2% of the company, according to investor documents and half-a-dozen sources with knowledge of the company’s multiple funding rounds. Keeping VCs below that line to ensure no one investor had outsized control was a goal Anthropic communicated to investors, one of these people said.

That’s a highly unusual circumstance for a tech firm on the brink of going public — even the widely held SpaceX had some institutional investors owning more than 3% of the company when it debuted.

Anthropic’s journey is instead marked by prestigious angel investors — many, though not all, associated with effective altruism — funding its early growth. The infamous Sam Bankman-Fried of the late FTX led the Series B, resulting in a big pot of shares being distributed to others after the crypto brokerage collapsed and Bankman-Fried was jailed. In subsequent rounds, Anthropic executives and its investors battled over what type of capital was or wasn’t allowed.

That isn’t to say there aren’t distinct VC winners in the Anthropic IPO. Menlo Ventures, Lightspeed, and Iconiq each led middle-stage funding rounds— and kept following on — building stakes that look to be worth tens of billions. Meanwhile, names like Spark Capital, Sound Ventures, and Factorial Funds got a piece of the company early and secured positions that are today also worth billions.

Anthropic’s massive appetite for capital has ended up having a gravity-warping effect on much of the VC industry, accelerating the trend towards megafunds as it all but remade the firms that backed it; investors accustomed to writing checks that rarely topped $100 million suddenly found themselves making nine- and ten-figure commitments to keep pace with the company’s growth. For nearly all of the venture players, Anthropic became the largest investment in their firms’ history.

Early Rounds a Tough Sell

Anthropic’s earliest rounds were a tough sell to the Silicon Valley establishment. Anjney Midha, an early backer and friend of the co-founders like Tom Brown, has said publicly that he helped pitch the company to 22 venture firms and that 21 passed. (He has never said which one didn’t.) So Amodei and his co-founders turned to wealthy individuals, many of them in or adjacent to the EA movement, including Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, who led the Series A, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Eric Schmidt, not explicitly an EA acolyte, also invested in the A round and is poised to be one of the IPO’s biggest winners.

(Tallinn remembers it differently. He said in a recent podcast interview that before investing, he asked Amodei to line up offers from venture firms. He wanted to be sure Anthropic would get funded with or without him, so his money would simply take a VC’s place rather than bring another AI lab into existence. The logic is very EA, and sure enough Bankman-Fried led the company’s B round.)

Prominent tech figures who were friendly with the founders tried to help out in those early days, but also struck out selling it to Sand Hill Road.

The breakthrough finally came with Anthropic’s Series C in the spring of 2023, when Spark Capital partner Yasmin Razavi agreed to take the leap. Spark, until then best known for backing consumer companies like Twitter, Oculus and Affirm, put in $75 million to lead the $450 million round, which valued Anthropic at about $4.6 billion before the new money. Google joined, along with under-the-radar firms including Factorial Funds, which put in about $50 million, and Sound Ventures, which invested $35 million. Factorial is an AI-focused shop started by former Cruise Automation engineer Sol Bier. Sound was co-founded by Ashton Kutcher and talent manager Guy Oseary. Menlo Ventures put in around $10 million and Zoom and Salesforce participated through their corporate venture arms.

Spark kept investing in later rounds, but with smaller checks, and its stake was diluted significantly as the price climbed. But Razavi scored a trophy that no other VC could claim by joining the company’s board. Under the terms of the C round, Spark’s right to name Razavi to the board was set to expire once Anthropic topped $1 billion in annual revenue, at which point its institutional preferred shareholders would choose the director instead, according to a document reviewed by Newcomer. Anthropic blew past that mark, but Razavi remains the only VC on the board.

After the company got through the challenging C round, which was still thin on brand-name VCs, the Silicon Valley purse strings finally loosened a bit. In the fall of 2023 Amazon announced a multi-billion-dollar commitment; the next year the startup announced it closed a $750 million series D led by Menlo partner Matt Murphy that valued the company at $18.4 billion.

A Dust-Up Over SPVs

Menlo’s commitment of more than $500 million, the largest in the firm’s history, was mostly raised through a special purpose vehicle (SPV). Accounts of how that came together differ. One source described a sprawling effort where the firm sent generic emails about the vehicle to a diffuse set of investors, including people who already had a stake in the company. One such email reviewed by Newcomer included links to a private data room and a webinar the firm was hosting.

Another source said the SPV was run in close coordination with Anthropic, which had reviewed the material that was shared in the webinar.

During the funding process, Murphy also brokered introductions between Anthropic executives and other investors including Byron Deeter at Bessemer, said sources familiar with the matter. Lightspeed invested $100 million in the D round and both it and Bessemer would go on to play larger roles in subsequent rounds.

The matter of SPVs would become a point of contention across multiple rounds, coming to a head after the series D when Anthropic brought on Krishna Rao as its CFO. The former Airbnb executive wanted to cut down on the proliferation of SPVs to help the company better understand the provenance of all the dollars flowing in. Among other concerns, he and Amodei wanted to ensure that no money from Middle Eastern, Chinese or Russian sources ended up backing the Anthropic, according to a person familiar with the matter. (The Gulf ban didn’t last: in July 2025, Amodei told staff in a leaked memo that the company would seek investment from the UAE and Qatar to stay competitive.)

Rao ultimately told VCs that if a firm was given an allocation to invest in Anthropic, they had to be good for the money themselves rather than marketing the stake to a wide collection of suitors, according to one investor.

Yet Rao’s message that SPVs were on their way out turned out to be less than categorical. Anthropic’s series E in spring 2025, which valued the company at $61.5 billion was led by Lightspeed, which put in $1 billion. The commitment was spread across multiple funds but filled out partially with additional dollars from its top LPs, who were allowed to co-invest in the round, according to documents reviewed by Newcomer.

Menlo participated in the E round as well. Rao permitted it to syndicate the round, but only to its top five LPs, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The SPV issue came around again in the fall of 2025 when Anthropic held its series F at $183 billion. Iconiq, which led the round, pitched its wealthy network of investors as part of its $3 billion allocation, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Again there are differing accounts on the nature of the pitch. One source says it was strictly a co-investment opportunity for Iconiq’s LPs and others in their network, with the full sign-off from Anthropic. Another person who reviewed the Iconiq pitch said there were fees attached to the vehicle, making it different from a typical no-fee LP co-investment.