As Anthropic moves toward a mega IPO that could give it a market cap of $1.4 trillion, the company revealed information in a new S-1 filing about how many shares each of its seven co-founders plan to sell.
Each will sell 3,378,378 shares. Anthropic has set an unusually wide opening price range of $70 to $78 per share. At the mid-range price point of $74, each founder will receive just under $250 million in funding.
At the $70 floor, each would have to come up with just over $236 million in cash. At the highest price of $78, each would earn just under $264 million.
But in hotly anticipated IPOs like this one, companies often price their shares beyond their initial range.
S-1 is already indicating high demand. Board member Reed Hastings said he wants to buy $300 million worth of stock through a donor-advised fund. Board member Christopher Liddell also wants to buy $3 million worth of stock.
The seven co-founders are CEO Dario Amodei; Daniela Amodei, President and Chairman of the Board; Tom Brown, Chief Computing Officer. Jack Clark, Head of Public Interest. Chief Scientific Officer Jared Kaplan (pictured above). Sam McCandlish, Chief Architect. and Interpretability Research Leader Christopher Olah.
After the sale, the companies will own approximately 3.2% of the total outstanding Class A stock, or approximately 22% in total, according to the S-1. It’s not their share of the overall company. Class A is just one of Anthropic’s share classes, and other holders, including Amazon and Google, hold Class N shares, which have no voting rights, leaving the founders with a much smaller stake in the company’s total capital. Yet, as a group, they continue to control the company. Each will also receive one Class F share with super voting rights. In total, founders will control 51.1% of the votes, but no single founder will hold significantly more shares or votes than any other founder.
In what is now industry lore, the seven left OpenAI in 2021 to found Anthropic after disagreements with OpenAI leadership over how to build AI. Brothers Dario and Daniela Amodei, who held senior research and policy positions at OpenAI, founded the company with five of their OpenAI colleagues and have said from the beginning that they prioritize AI safety more than their rivals, including the founder’s former employer.
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