As Anthropic heads toward a massive IPO that could value it at $1.4 trillion, the company disclosed a disclosure in its new S-1 filing about how many shares each of its seven co-founders plans to sell.
Each will sell 3,378,378 shares. Anthropic offered an unusually wide initial price range, between $70 and $78 per share. At the midpoint of $74, each founder would make just under $250 million.
At the low end of the scale, $70, each should be happy to pocket just over $236 million in cash; at the highest level, $78, each would bring in just under $264 million.
However, in an IPO as highly anticipated as this one, companies can often price their shares above the initial range.
The S-1 already suggests strong demand. Board member Reed Hastings said he wants to buy $300 million worth of stock through his donor-advised fund. Board member Christopher Liddell also wants to buy $3 million worth of stock.
The seven co-founders are Dario Amodei, CEO; Daniela Amodei, president and chair of the board of directors; Tom Brown, IT director; Jack Clark, Public Welfare Officer; Jared Kaplan, scientific director (photo above); Sam McCandlish, chief architect; and Christopher Olah, head of interpretability research.
After the sale, each of them will own approximately 3.2% of the total outstanding Class A shares, according to the S-1, or approximately 22% collectively. It’s not their part in the whole enterprise. Class A is just one of Anthropic’s share classes, and other holders, including Amazon and Google, hold non-voting Class N shares, so the founders’ stake in the company’s total stock will be significantly smaller. Despite everything, they retain, as a group, control of the company. Each will also receive one Class F share, which carries super voting rights. Collectively, the founders will control 51.1% of the votes, but no founder will hold significantly more shares or votes than the others.
As is now the case in the industry, the seven left OpenAI to launch Anthropic in 2021 after disagreements with OpenAI executives over how the AI should be built. Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who held senior research and policy roles at OpenAI, were joined by five OpenAI colleagues to form a company that said, very publicly and from the start, that it was more focused on AI safety than its competitors, including the founders’ former employer.
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