Anthropic, the maker of Claude, is lining up Japanese money for its stock market debut. The company plans to sell up to ¥552.9bn of shares, about $3.5bn, to investors in Japan as part of its US initial public offering, according to a filing published on Monday, 2 November, Reuters reports.
The filing says the new shares sold in Japan will fund working capital, operating expenses and capital expenditure. It does not say how big the whole IPO will be or what it values Anthropic at. Some investors have discussed a valuation of about $1.5 trillion, Reuters has reported, far above the $183bn the company was valued at after its $13bn Series F round.
Related · StartupsOpenAI Cuts Its Funding Target From $30B to $20BThe ChatGPT maker has scaled back its round and its valuation to about $1.25 trillion as investors grow wary of AI spending, the FT and WSJ report.Bigger than SpaceX's Japanese slice
Japanese investors bought $2.2bn of the $75bn SpaceX raised in its June listing, the largest IPO on record, according to Reuters. Anthropic's planned Japanese portion is about 1.6 times that, on a deal whose total size has not been disclosed.
The listing has been the AI industry's most watched since Anthropic filed publicly in late October; TheStak has reported on what its draft filing showed and why it is the last big tech listing left this year. It also comes as rival OpenAI is reported to have scaled back its own private fundraising, a sign that investors are getting choosier about AI spending.
