VCs will make billions on Anthropic’s IPO, but Amazon is set to make much (much) more

When Anthropic goes public, a lot of investors will get paid. Menlo Ventures, Sequoia, Sound Ventures and Spark Capital are all expected to take home billions, even though none of them shows up in the S-1 as a principal stockholder. That’s unusual for a tech IPO. Normally the lead venture firms own chunky double-digit stakes. Here, Anthropic is simply too valuable for that math to hold.

At a $965 billion private valuation, even 1% of Anthropic is worth nearly $10 billion. Bloomberg recently put Menlo’s position at roughly $14 billion, which works out to only about 1.5% of the company. So the venture winners are real, just not huge in percentage terms. The bigger story is that Anthropic sold big positions to strategic partners, including companies that also buy from it.

Amazon looks like the biggest financial winner. It first committed up to $4 billion in 2023, then kept adding money through convertible notes instead of taking stock right away. The S-1 says Amazon held $6.2 billion in principal outstanding as of June 30, which equals Anthropic’s entire debt load. But because Anthropic’s valuation kept climbing, Amazon’s note position became much more valuable. Amazon’s own filings valued those notes at $97.9 billion as of June 30.

That swelling value also hit Anthropic’s books. The company recorded $72.4 billion in the first half of 2026 under “change in fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities, and SAFEs.” It was a non-cash charge, so no money left the business. Amazon’s notes could convert into as many as 1.84 billion shares, though a cap limits it to 12% of Anthropic’s partially diluted share count unless Amazon waives the cap. And the notes are only one piece of the deal: Amazon also put $10 billion into nonvoting preferred stock in the second quarter, bringing its total investment to about $18 billion.

Cloud revenue matters too. Anthropic has promised to spend at least $110 billion on AWS over the next 10 years. Google is also in line for a major payoff, with court filings reported by The New York Times showing it held about 14% of Anthropic as of early last year, and PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes estimating its stake is now closer to 5.6% after more funding. Google has also secured at least $114 billion in cloud commitments through 2033. The S-1 leaves a blunt message: the IPO may enrich VCs, but the giant tech companies that funded Anthropic and sell it compute may do even better.