Venture firms including Menlo Ventures, Sequoia, Sound Ventures and Spark Capital stand to make billions from Anthropic's IPO, but Amazon is positioned to gain far more. Anthropic's S-1 shows none of those investors holds the 5% needed to appear in the principal stockholders' table, which is unusual for a tech listing.
The reason is scale. At a private valuation of $965 billion, a 1% stake is worth nearly $10 billion. Menlo's position of roughly $14 billion therefore amounts to only about 1.5% of the company, based on figures previously reported by Bloomberg.
Amazon's exposure is structured differently. It first committed to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic in 2023 and put much of its money into convertible notes, which turn into shares on an IPO or sale. The S-1 shows $6.2 billion in principal outstanding as of June 30, which is Anthropic's entire debt. Amazon's own filings valued those notes at $97.9 billion on that date.
That rise forced Anthropic to book a non-cash charge of $72.4 billion in the first half of 2026 under the line for change in fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs. The notes could convert into as many as 1.84 billion shares, but Amazon's share is capped at 12% of the partially diluted share count unless it waives the limit. Notes that cannot convert will stay outstanding and convert in later quarters.
Amazon also invested $10 billion in nonvoting preferred stock in the second quarter, putting $5 billion into each of the last two funding rounds. With $8 billion put into the notes from 2023 through 2025, its total investment is about $18 billion. Anthropic has also committed to spend at least $110 billion on AWS over 10 years.
Google is set for a windfall too. It held about 14% as of early last year, according to court filings, and invested $10 billion more in April. PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes estimates its diluted stake is closer to 8%. Anthropic has committed at least $114 billion in cloud spending with Google through 2033. The S-1 warns that some cloud providers build rival AI models and may not share Anthropic's goals.
