Katie here. The Anthropic S-1 is here, and it confirms what VCs have been whispering for months: this is a company moving at warp speed. Just over three years after its first major VC round, Anthropic is poised to break IPO records and deliver historic wins to its earliest backers. It happened! After a fall full of delays, Anthropic’s S-1 finally dropped.
What stood out to me was how incredibly fast Anthropic has scaled. Spark Capital was the first firm to lead a round into the AI giant in spring 2023 – just three and a half years ago. They own more than 1% of the company, an investment that could be worth tens of billions of dollars in short order.
It was just months ago that SpaceX set the record for the largest ever IPO, but that timeline was remarkably different: the first venture capitalists invested in 2002! "There's no company that's gone from zero to where they are today in this period of time,” said Byron Deeter, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners.
The firm has spent $800 million investing in Anthropic since 2024, the largest bet in its history, netting Bessemer an almost 1% stake. At the time Bessemer first invested, many in the industry considered the $18 billion price tag to be steep for a startup that wasn’t the industry leader. Some dismissed Anthropic as a “FOMO bet,” that investors were just disappointed that they missed out on OpenAI.
Deeter knew that was the perception, but said he had conviction that Anthropic could take the lead or come close, believing that “even if they didn't fully get there, they were going to be a hell of a challenger.” They not only challenged OpenAI, but they also beat them to the IPO. The ChatGPT-maker expects to go public next year.
Although Anthropic’s numbers quieted some (but not all) financial critics, other AI-related issues are still expected to be controversial at the ballot box next week. Right now, the tech industry wants more compute, and the populists are against data centers... Ben Bergman here in New York. I’m in town for The Long Play, featuring media mogul Barry Diller, Take-Two’s Strauss Zelnick, Ro’s Zach Reitano, and many more.
I hope to see some of you there today, or tonight at the Eniac Ventures Halloween party. Costumes are required, so I’ll be curious to see what VCs are choosing this year. I’m tempted to go as filmmaker Nathan Fielder. I went on a walk this week with a VC at a large firm on a sunny fall day in the West Village.
Even though they are based here, they said they spend nearly all their time in San Francisco these days because it’s the epicenter of the AI boom and home to the startups they care about.
Separately, I asked New York-based VC Jesse Middleton, a general partner at Flybridge, for his read on New York these days, and he texted me: “It’s true that SF is where most of the models have been trained, and the dollars are certainly there for the big guys, but New York is where founders turn them into products for the rest of the world (not just developers).
The app layer here is booming, including Clay, Hebbia, Rogo, and ElevenLabs. Every industry that actually has to buy this stuff sits within a few subway stops of our office.” By the way, New York is still the more expensive city to rent an apartment, but San Francisco is rapidly closing the gap.
Median asking rent for a one-bedroom is about $4,580 per month in New York City, versus roughly $4,400 in San Francisco, a difference of only $180, according to Zumper. Who wants to bet San Francisco will…
