When Anthropic opened a tender offer to its staff earlier this year, investors showed up with as much as $6 billion ready to deploy. They walked away with far less. Per Bloomberg, current and former employees just weren’t keen to part with their stock, and the secondary sale closed well short of target in early April. The deal priced at the same $350 billion valuation Anthropic had locked in during its February fundraise.Three months on, the reason looks obvious.The Claude maker has agreed terms on a fresh $30 billion round at a $900 billion valuation, the Financial Times reported on May 15. Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital and Altimeter Capital are co-leading, each likely writing cheques of $2 billion or more. That nearly triples the company’s worth in roughly 90 days. The round came together at speed too—CFO Krishna Rao only kicked off talks with backers a fortnight ago.
The $30 billion revenue run rate that changed the math for Anthropic staff
The math wasn’t hard to do. Anthropic’s annualised run-rate revenue jumped from $19 billion in March to $30 billion in April, and is on track to cross $45 billion soon. That is a fivefold leap from the $9 billion it closed 2025 at. CEO Dario Amodei told a developer conference earlier this month that the company had planned for 10x growth this year and instead got 80x—fast enough that its own infrastructure has struggled to keep up.For employees sitting on equity, cashing out at $350 billion while the next round was already brewing would have meant leaving real money behind. Bloomberg said the smaller-than-expected tender offer signalled staff confidence in the IPO, expected as soon as October. Some investors got their full allocation, others got a fraction of what they had set aside.
Anthropic IPO 2026: a $60 billion listing and a $1 trillion secondary signal
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are already in early talks for roles on the listing, which could raise more than $60 billion. Anthropic shares have reportedly been changing hands on the secondary market at an implied $1 trillion valuation, with demand only sharpening.Three of the four firms leading the new round also back OpenAI, valued at $852 billion in its last raise. If Anthropic closes this deal, it overtakes its rival for the first time, capping a year in which the underdog quietly became the front-runner. For staff who held onto their stock, the wait keeps getting more rewarding.