Oct 19 (Reuters) – Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt owns about 1% of Anthropic, positioning him for one of the largest individual windfalls when the AI startup goes public, Bloomberg News reported on Monday.
• Schmidt invested tens of millions of dollars in Anthropic’s Series A funding round, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. It was unclear whether he has sold any of his stake since.
• Anthropic and Schmidt’s representatives did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
• Anthropic’s planned initial public offering is expected to generate substantial returns for its early investors and employees.
• Some investors discussed a valuation of around $1.5 trillion at an investor meeting, below earlier expectations of roughly $2 trillion, Reuters reported last week.
• In its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters in September, Anthropic laid out a vision that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet.
• Amazon and Google were among Anthropic’s early backers, investing billions of dollars and supplying the cloud computing capacity required to develop and run its Claude AI models.
• Schmidt served as Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011 and later as executive chairman of its parent company, Alphabet, before stepping down in January 2018.
(Reporting by Prakhar Srivastava in Bengaluru; Editing by Shreya Biswas)
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