The Anthropic IPO?

SPEAKER_1 (0:05)

Good morning, good evening, wherever you are.

Brian Gracely (0:06)

Welcome back to The Enterprise AI Show. I'm your host, Brian Gracely. And today, doing another weekend perspective, except during the week, solo show.

Last time, last Sunday, a couple of days ago, we did a kind of a breakdown of OpenAI prior to, you know, as of September 2026, sort of where they stand as they start to prepare for potential IPO, whether that is sometime this year or it gets moved into next year, whatever happens, sort of broke down their financials, sort of broke down their strengths, their weaknesses, you know, where they were revenue wise, where they were in terms of financial obligations, funding, all those sort of things. And thought we would do the same sort of thing for Anthropic, seeing as they are, you know, the two of them are really kind of considered probably number one and number two in terms of Frontier Labs, sort of front and center in terms of a lot of the revenue, whether it's direct revenue, circular revenue, circular funding, whatever you want to look at it, in terms of the AI industry. Obviously, there's other players like Nvidia and Google and others. But these two are sort of front and center. And we thought we would kind of dig into the Anthropic case right after the break.

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Brian Gracely (2:46)

And we're back. And as I mentioned in the show on Sunday, nothing in this show should be considered financial advice. This is not intended to be financial advice, forward-looking information. This is really just us looking at information that is out in the public or relatively public. Sometimes these are numbers that are derived from leaked information and so forth. But a lot of folks trying to just get a handle on kind of what is the picture going to look like for Anthropic in terms of as they start to get close to an IPO, you start to look at things like not just is their technology cool? Do they have a vision for the future? Are they attracting great talent? How fast are they able to build new models? But you start looking at the financials of the business, you look at the go-to-market of the business, you look at a lot of things because as we move from fully VC funded, round-to-funding, start a start-up phase into something that's going to go into public phase, you start to have a whole lot of different scrutiny upon you. Some of that scrutiny is just from the timing perspective of moving into a public company, quarterly earnings, quarterly demand, starting to have outside investors who have very large stakes in what you're doing, whether those are hedge funds or their institutional investors or at some point, could become raiders and hostile investors and so forth. The move from being a private company to a public company does just come for any company, not just for Anthropic, comes with a bunch of scrutiny, and it comes with a push for a faster timeline than you typically had when you're a private company. You controlled your burn rate, you controlled your roadmap, you controlled how fast you're putting these out in the future. Obviously, the marketplace plays a role in that as well. You can't just decide that you're going to do things whenever you feel like it. There are competitive threats, competitive pressures. Customers are going to make decisions that fit what they want as opposed to what you want. But I thought it'd be worth digging into where Anthropic is these days, especially as we are in end of September, 2026 There's talk that they may try and go IPO here in the November timeframe. Again, these are all just speculative things. Please don't take them as financial advice. But if we dig into some of their numbers, we dig into where they are today. If we look at the numbers that have been put out there, and again, keep in mind, these are numbers that are coming from a lot of different places. In some cases, they're perceived to be leaked numbers that might have got picked up by the press. In some cases, these are numbers that are being relayed from investors that are getting pitched to potentially be larger investors in Anthropic or being pitched to banks to be the listing agent for Anthropic as they try and go IPO on one of the major markets, whether it's New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq or whatever it might be. Just looking at a few of those numbers, first thing we want to look at is top line revenue. The numbers that are being put out there, if we go back to 2024, estimated revenue was somewhere in the 380 to $400 million range. We go forward a year to 2025