Anthropic backers offer up to $500 million in IPO shares at a premium

Some Anthropic PBC backers are offering a portion of their IPO allocation to new investors in the run-up to the largest public listing on record.

JonesTrading Institutional Services LLC is marketing a block of Anthropic shares of up to $500 million on behalf of investors that are anticipating sizable allocations on the deal. The offering is being pitched with a fee of 3% to 5% on top of where the initial public offering prices.

Such deals could allow investment firms to de-risk a portion of their position in the offering while trying to broaden their own investor base. Jon Jefferies, head of private markets at JonesTrading, declined to comment on any specific Anthropic transactions, but said these types of deals are going to proliferate in the market.

“These types of transactions are very new to the marketplace,” Jefferies said. “The first time we saw them was with the SpaceX IPO and we were skeptical at first but many of them cleared without any issues.”

“We have been surprised at the level of interest from savvy institutional investors.” There are many such deals tied to Anthropic that are being floated in the market, Jefferies said.

Investors have been chasing exposure to coveted pre-IPO shares in the most valuable startups, fueling a cottage industry of those with stakes syndicating them out to smaller investors. Now that dynamic is playing out at the IPO share allocation stage, with some deep-pocketed investors buying large amounts of stock and parceling out access, for a price.

The shares won’t be subject to any lock-up agreement preventing insiders from selling, though buyers will be subject to approval by both the sellers and a bank working on the IPO, according to the people familiar with the deal structure.

Separately, another seller is offering more than $1 billion of existing stock at a $1.4 trillion to $1.6 trillion valuation, with an additional fee tied to it. The shares are offered as part of a so-called special purpose vehicle, a wrapper that some pre-IPO shareholders use to sell exposure to their stakes in a target company. The SPV has a single layer, the people said, meaning the vehicle owns the stock directly.

Anthropic has been vocal this year about sales or transfers of its stock that aren’t approved by its board of directors. A company blog highlights that such deals won’t be recognized on its records, with a focus on SPVs and retail investment funds.

A spokesperson for Anthropic declined to comment for this story.

Anthropic is seeking a fully diluted valuation of about $1.4 trillion in its IPO. The Claude chatbot maker and some of its backers are seeking to raise as much as $90.4 billion in the IPO and a private placement. Taken together, the offerings would be bigger than SpaceX’s $75 billion base deal, making it the biggest listing of all time.

In an IPO, the company and the lead banks determine which investors are allocated shares at the final offer price, with the majority typically going to institutional buyers. Sellers often give preference to investors that can take large amounts of stock, and whose strategies focus on buying and holding stakes in public companies over the medium-to-long term, supporting the share price rather than taking a quick profit.