Analysis
Anthropic posted $17 billion in third-quarter revenue, up 47% from the prior quarter, alongside a $567 million operating loss, Pulse previously reported.
What's changed since that report: Fortune has now gathered specific analyst math showing just how aggressive Anthropic's reported $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion IPO target range really is, with two named valuation experts putting the company's defensible range below that floor.
What does Anthropic do and how has it grown
Anthropic is a San Francisco-based public benefit corporation founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers including Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, and it sells access to its Claude AI models to businesses and developers. Compute and infrastructure costs rose about 77% in the quarter to $9.9 billion, with roughly $5 billion of that from short-term capacity purchases, pressuring adjusted operating margin down to 15% from 19% a quarter earlier, Fortune reported.
“- Series C -- $450M (2023): led by Spark Capital; Google separately committed up to $2B for roughly a 10% stake.”
The company held about $131.8 billion in cash and short-term investments as of September 30 and generated $6.6 billion in operating cash flow over the first nine months of the year.
Anthropic's funding history
According to Pulse's prior coverage and public funding disclosures:
- Series A -- $124M (2021): $550M pre-money valuation; led by Dustin Moskovitz and Jaan Tallinn.
- Series B -- $580M (2022): $4B valuation.
- Series C -- $450M (2023): led by Spark Capital; Google separately committed up to $2B for roughly a 10% stake.
- Series D -- $750M (Feb 2024): $18B valuation; led by Menlo Ventures.
- Series E -- $3.5B (Mar 2025): $61.5B valuation; led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
- Series F -- $13B (Sep 2025): $183B valuation; led by ICONIQ.
- Series G -- $30B (Feb 2026): $380B valuation; led by GIC and Coatue.
- Series H -- $65B (May 2026): $965B valuation; led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Greenoaks Capital and Sequoia Capital.
A $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion IPO would roughly double that last private mark in under six months.
Who is skeptical of Anthropic's IPO math
Jay Ritter, who runs the University of Florida's IPO database and has studied 4,110 US IPOs priced since 1980, told Fortune that a valuation above roughly $1.41 trillion requires Anthropic to show a credible path to at least $100 billion in annual after-tax profit -- a bar that, in any given year, only Alphabet, Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft have cleared. Of those 4,110 IPOs, Ritter found just 14 priced at or above the price-to-sales multiple Anthropic's target range implies, and those 14 went on to underperform the broader market by an average of 15.4% over holding periods of up to three years.
Separately, NYU Stern's Aswath Damodaran pegged Anthropic's equity value near $1.475 trillion in a pre-earnings estimate built on $1 trillion of revenue by 2036 and a 27.5% operating-margin target -- below the low end of the company's own range.
What happens next for Anthropic's IPO
The downside risk is real: most of Ritter's 14 historical comparables underperformed after pricing at similar multiples, and Anthropic's own growth is already decelerating -- Q3's 47% quarter-over-quarter revenue gain is less than a third of the 144% growth it posted in Q2. Ritter still called Anthropic's position one of "substantial upside potential," cautioning that "a lot of things have to go right." The next signal to watch is whether Anthropic's bankers anchor an eventual S-1 price range near the $1.5 trillion level that institutional investors reportedly prefer, as Fortune reported citing the Wall Street Journal, or push toward management's higher target -- a gap that will determine whether Anthropic becomes the test case for whether AI-lab valuations can survive public-market scrutiny.