Anthropic's S-1 Hands VCs the Fastest Mega-Win in Startup History

By Olivia Hart

Bessemer Venture Partners has sunk $800 million into Anthropic since 2024 — the largest bet in the firm's history — and the S-1 filing that just dropped suggests it will convert into an almost 1% stake in what could become one of the fastest zero-to-IPO runs ever recorded. Anthropic's IPO paperwork arrived this week, setting up historic gains for the venture firms that backed the AI company early, according to Business Insider's VC Insider newsletter.

How fast is fast?

Spark Capital led the first round into Anthropic in spring 2023 — three and a half years ago — and now holds more than 1% of the company, a position the newsletter reports could be worth tens of billions of dollars "in short order." For comparison, SpaceX, which recently set the record for the largest IPO ever, took a very different path: its first venture investors came in back in 2002, a 23-year wait versus Anthropic's three and a half.

The takeaway in plain words: no venture-backed company has compressed this much value creation into this little time.

What did the skeptics say?

Bessemer first wrote its check at an $18 billion valuation — a price many in the industry considered steep for a startup that was not the market leader at the time. Some dismissed Anthropic as a "FOMO bet," arguing investors were simply sulking over having missed OpenAI.

Byron Deeter, a partner at Bessemer, acknowledged that perception but said he believed Anthropic could take the lead or come close. "Even if they didn't fully get there, they were going to be a hell of a challenger," Deeter said. His framing was blunt on the pace of it all: "There's no company that's gone from zero to where they are today in this period of time."

Anthropic did not just challenge OpenAI. It beat its rival to the public markets — the ChatGPT-maker expects to go public next year, roughly twelve months behind. Still, the newsletter notes Anthropic's numbers quieted some, but not all, financial critics. And with the US ballot next week, AI remains contested terrain: the tech industry wants more compute, while populists campaign against data centers.

Who else is cashing in around the cap table?

The S-1 caps a busy stretch of AI and startup dealmaking. A tally of founders and VC stakeholders in Anthropic accompanied the filing, and Spark Capital was mentioned more than 50 times in the IPO paperwork. Elsewhere:

• AI coding startup Cognition has received fresh offers valuing it between $70 billion and $80 billion.
• Software company Guidewire is acquiring UK-based agentic insurance startup Hyperexponential for $1.7 billion.
• Canadian fintech Wealthsimple raised financing at a CAD $13.8 billion valuation.
• Ferring acquired fertility startup Gameto for $1.4 billion.
• Intel bought Israeli quantum startup Classiq for $2.3 billion.
• Andreessen Horowitz expanded its crypto fund into other emerging technologies and rebranded it a16z Frontier.
• The US Department of Justice is probing whether Nvidia's nearly $13 billion deal to buy Hugging Face would hurt AI competition.
• Elizabeth Holmes' husband Billy Evans has launched a blood-testing startup co-founded with Palantir board member Lauren Friedman Stat.

The takeaway in plain words: the money flowing into AI deals is no longer concentrated in model makers — it now spans insurance, fertility, quantum computing and antitrust scrutiny.

Does New York still matter to AI?

Not everyone has decamped to San Francisco, but the pull is real. One New York-based VC at a large firm told the newsletter they now spend nearly all their time in San Francisco because it is the epicenter of the AI boom and home to the startups they track.

Jesse Middleton, a general partner at Flybridge, pushed back by text: "It's true that SF is where most of the models have been trained, and the dollars are certainly there for the big guys, but New York is where founders turn them into products for the rest of the world (not just developers). The app layer here is booming, including Clay, Hebbia, Rogo, and ElevenLabs. Every industry that actually has to buy this stuff sits within a few subway stops of our office."

The rent data frames the tug-of-war. Median asking rent for a one-bedroom is about $4,580 a month in New York versus roughly $4,400 in San Francisco — a gap of just $180, according to Zumper. At that pace, San Francisco could overtake New York within a year.

Whether the IPO window stays open long enough for OpenAI, Cognition and the rest to follow Anthropic's three-and-a-half-year sprint is the question every limited partner will now be pricing.