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In the spring of 2024 the people winding up FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto exchange, sold one of the most valuable things it still owned: 44.5 million shares in Anthropic. FTX had paid $500 million for them in 2022. The estate sold them at $30 each, raised about $1.34 billion for creditors, and moved on. On Monday Anthropic filed to go public. At the price investors paid in its last funding round, in May, those same shares would now be worth about $26 billion, nearly twenty times what the estate received.

The filing turns a private argument into a public one. Who backed Anthropic, at what price, and what are they sitting on now? The answers say a good deal about how venture capital actually makes its money. In this week’s edition we take a look at the investors that have backed Anthropic to date, what they might return from their initial investment, and a deeper look at one of the most impressive venture capital funds that’s likely to be among the biggest winners, Spark Capital. 

Anthropic filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on 26 October for a Nasdaq listing under the ticker ANT. The document runs to 335 pages and lists 22 banks, led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. It shows revenue of $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, against $1.2 billion in the same period a year earlier, and $41 million, $386 million and $4.6 billion for 2023, 2024 and 2025. It also shows a share structure in which a single Class F share, held by the seven co-founders, carries 50.1 per cent of the vote.

What it does not show is a price. The range and the number of shares on offer are blank, which is normal for a first public filing. Under SEC practice the roadshow cannot start before 10 November, and the listing has been reported for the week of 16 November. Investors have talked about a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion. None of that is fixed, so this edition uses $965 billion throughout: the post-money valuation of the $65 billion Series H in May, and the last price anyone has actually paid. If the shares list at the top of the reported range, the paper values below roughly double. If they list beneath $965 billion, the wider financial markets could also be in trouble. 

Anthropic has raised eight priced rounds since it was founded in 2021, and the valuation has risen more than 1,500-fold between the first and the last. The shape of the table explains most of what follows. The first four rounds raised less than $2 billion between them. The last four raised more than $110 billion.

It is easy to forget how unfashionable this was. In early 2021 Anj Midha, a friend of the founders who later became a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, set up 22 introductions to venture firms on the company’s behalf. Twenty-one said no. AI, as Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s president, later put it, “was not viewed as this super sexy, exciting thing that you would want to invest in.”

So the first money came from individuals. Jaan Tallinn, the Skype co-founder, led the $124 million Series A. Dustin Moskovitz invested, and has since moved his position into a non-profit vehicle. Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive, wrote a cheque reported only as “tens of millions”, when the company was valued at about $461 million. He is now reported to own about 1%, worth close to $10 billion on paper. Series A shares were priced at about $2.57 before this year’s 10-for-1 split, against $589.01 at the Series H, a rise of roughly 230 times. Even on the most generous reading of “tens of millions”, his return is comfortably above 100 times.

The Series B, in 2022, was led by FTX, which is how a crypto exchange came to own one of the most valuable positions in AI, and how its creditors came to sell it at about a twentieth of today’s price. Sound Ventures, the firm Guy Oseary and Ashton Kutcher set up, joined in 2023 with $35 million and added roughly $400 million later. TechCrunch puts that position at “billions”, without a figure.

One firm sits between the angels and the institutions, and its story is the most instructive on the cap table. Spark Capital wrote the first large institutional cheque into Anthropic, and holds the only venture seat on its board.

Spark was founded in 2005 with $260 million and an advertisement in the New York Times. Its founders came out of Boston’s old venture establishment: Todd Dagres, who had backed Akamai at Battery Ventures; Santo Politi, from Blockbuster’s new-media division; Paul Conway, the former finance chief of Charles River Ventures; and Dennis Miller, a former TNT executive. Bijan Sabet, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Charles River after a decade in Silicon Valley, joined at the start. In a city whose investors preferred enterprise software and hardware, Spark backed consumer internet companies, games and media. “We tend to invest in things we use,” Sabet told the Boston Globe in 2013.

The approach made the firm’s name. Spark first invested in Twitter in 2008, putting in about $50 million over several rounds, a position the Globe estimated could be worth $640 million when the company listed in 2013. It co-invested in Tumblr with Union Square Ventures, and each firm took home about $192 million when Yahoo bought the company for $1.1 billion. It was an early backer of Oculus, which Facebook bought for about $2 billion in 2014, and of Cruise, before General Motors bought control in 2016. Slack, Discord, Warby Parker, Wayfair, Coinbase, Affirm and Plaid followed.

For its first fifteen years Spark’s flagship funds stayed under $500 million each. In 2014 it raised its first growth fund, $375 million, to keep investing in its best companies as they raised larger rounds. The Anthropic cheque came from the fourth of those growth funds, $1.4 billion raised in 2021.

Yasmin Razavi was born in Tehran, the daughter of a doctor and a steel manufacturer. On a school trip to visit her brother in Canada she decided not to go home. She studied industrial engineering at the University of Toronto, worked on back-office projects at McKinsey, and joined Index Ventures’ London office in a role that asked for gaming and Nordic experience she did not have. Harvard Business School followed, with an internship on Snap’s monetisation team, and then Spark.

Her record before Anthropic was mixed in the way that venture records usually are. She backed Marqeta in 2019 at a $1.9 billion valuation; it listed at about $15 billion and, according to Forbes, has since fallen to a market value of about $1.6 billion. She led Deel’s Series B in 2020 at a $200 million valuation; it is now valued at about $17 billion. In May, at 37, she entered the Midas List, Forbes’ annual ranking of the world’s top 100 venture investors by the deals they have backed, at No. 13, the highest-placed newcomer.

In May 2023 Spark led Anthropic’s $450 million Series C at a valuation of about $5 billion. ChatGPT had been out for six months. Spark’s own share was $75 million, the largest cheque in the firm’s history, drawn from the $1.4 billion growth fund it had raised two years earlier. Razavi wrote two long memos to bring her partners round. She called it “a big leap of faith”, and made the case on the people: “this was the team that built GPT-3.” Menlo Ventures, which would lead the next round, put in about $10 million. Google, Salesforce Ventures, Sound Ventures and Zoom Ventures also took part.

Razavi joined the board. Under the Series C terms Spark could appoint her only until Anthropic passed $1 billion of annual revenue, after which the institutional preferred shareholders would choose the director. The company passed that mark long ago and she is still there, the only venture investor on a board that also includes the Amodeis and Reed Hastings. Daniela Amodei credits her with pushing the founders to treat coding as a market of its own. It became one: Claude Code reached a reported $2.5 billion run rate by April.

Bloomberg has reported Spark’s $75 million as worth about $7 billion, roughly 93 times cost, and the figure has been repeated widely. The likey explanation is that $7 billion describes Spark’s whole position. In May, Forbes put the “$75 million plus follow-ons” at “at least $3 billion”, when Anthropic was valued at $380 billion; carried forward to the Series H share price, that lands at around $7 billion. The S-1, as reported, shows Spark’s funds bought about $777 million of preferred stock across six rounds between 2023 and 2026. On that basis the blended multiple is nearer 9 times.

The first cheque alone is worth more than two and a half times the entire $1.4 billion fund it came from. Venture funds are built in the hope that one company will return the whole fund. This one may return it several times over before anything else in the portfolio is counted, provided the price holds until Spark is allowed to sell.

Spark’s record is not a straight line success. In the same spring that it backed Anthropic, it co-led a $350 million round in Adept AI, another start-up founded by former OpenAI and Google researchers. A year later Amazon hired Adept’s founders and licensed its technology, and investors were reportedly paid back roughly what they had put in. Cruise, the self-driving company it backed early, was wound down as a robotaxi business when General Motors stopped funding it at the end of 2024. Marqeta made its round trip in public. The firm’s newer AI bets, among them the data-centre builder Crusoe, the chip designer MatX and the inference company Baseten, have not yet met a public market.

In June Spark closed $3.3 billion of new money: a $1 billion early-stage fund and a $2.33 billion growth fund. That is more than 40 per cent above what it raised in 2024, and the new growth fund is two-thirds larger than the one that wrote the Anthropic cheque.

The two largest outside shareholders are also Anthropic’s biggest suppliers. Amazon has invested $18 billion: $8 billion of convertible notes between 2023 and 2025, and $5 billion each in the Series G and Series H. Its own quarterly filing carried the position at about $190 billion at the end of June, $97.9 billion of notes at fair value and $92.5 billion of preferred stock, roughly 10.6 times cost. Amazon recorded $62.8 billion of upward revaluations on the stake in the first half of 2026 alone, and its remaining notes convert subject to a 12 per cent ownership cap.

Google does not disclose its stake or its cost. Alphabet valued its private-company holdings at about $124 billion at the end of June, a figure it says “primarily” reflects one investment, which Bloomberg reports is Anthropic, and its second-quarter results included a $98 billion net gain on equity securities, mostly unrealised and shared with its SpaceX stake. From reported deals Google has put in about $13 billion, which would make its return roughly 9 times. New purchases are capped at 14.99 per cent, and Google has the option to buy non-voting shares alongside the IPO at the offering price. Neither company’s shares carry a vote.

The more telling number is what flows back. According to the filing and coverage of it, Anthropic has committed about $110 billion to Amazon Web Services through 2036 and about $114.5 billion to Google Cloud through 2033. That is roughly six dollars of cloud spending for every dollar Amazon has invested, and nearly nine for every dollar from Google. Each company is financing a customer contractually committed to spend many times the investment on its own infrastructure, and booking a paper gain on that customer as its valuation rises. This is the circular financing the IMF has warned about, in its most concentrated form. Anthropic’s own risk factors note that its cloud providers also build rival models, so the relationships “may not always be fully aligned” with its interests. When Anthropic lists, the share price will feed straight back into what Amazon and Alphabet report as profit.

The power law is on full display here. Venture capital makes its money from a few very large outcomes, and Anthropic is about as large as they come. Spark’s first $75 million is worth about $3.8 billion on paper, more than two and a half times the entire fund it came from. Eric Schmidt’s Series A cheque has grown more than 100 times. FTX’s $500 million would be worth about $26 billion had the estate been able to hold on. Any one of those positions is large enough to carry a fund by itself, which is the economic logic of the whole asset class: most bets return little, as Adept and Cruise showed, and the rare one that works pays for all of them many times over.

Entry price is what separates the multiples. Cheques written at $461 million and $5 billion are up roughly 50 to more than 100 times. Cheques written at $183 billion and $380 billion are up less than three times, even though they bought into a company already earning billions. The early backers took a risk that twenty-one of twenty-two firms turned down in 2021, and Spark kept buying as the price rose. For anyone outside the room, the hard part was access to those early rounds and the nerve to keep following them.

None of this is guaranteed to survive contact with public markets. In its October Global Financial Stability Report, the International Monetary Fund warned that the AI investment boom could turn to bust if the profits do not follow, and singled out circular financing, in which AI companies act as each other’s investors, lenders and customers. Anthropic is a clear case: Amazon and Google are among its largest shareholders and also supply much of its compute. Every multiple in this edition is a paper mark at the last private price, most big holders cannot fully sell for up to a year after listing, and public investors are expected to buy in November at the highest price the company has ever carried, with almost no vote. They will have far less margin for error than Spark had in 2023.

The Unsophisticated Investor is brought to you by Mark, Head of UK Expansion & Operations at Shuttle. Shuttle's mission is to power the next generation of syndicate leads, fund managers, and their investors, backing the great innovations of tomorrow. To do it, we're building private market infrastructure for running investment operations. By stripping away the legal friction and admin for deal managers, we make it easier than ever for Investment managers to run high-performing opportunities and to open those opportunities up to a wider, modern network of investors.

Mark
Shuttle’s Head of UK Expansion & Operations