Anthropic raises $13B Series F

alphabet is "worth" 2.45 trillion on the public market, is anthropic worth a bit less than 10% of google going forward? I don't think that's entirely unreasonable...

Sounds hugely unreasonable. At 1% I might've believed you.

Alphabet 2024 revenue: 350 billions dollars Anthropic 2024 revenue: 1 billion dollars

Unreasonable doesn’t even start to capture it. Anthropic being worth 10% of Alphabet is beyond insane.

It feels a bit unreasonable to me. Anthropic is arguably comparable to Google's Gemini program. Is Gemini 10% of Alphabet's value? If so, how much of that is because of its ability to consume and interact with things like YouTube and Workspaces?

I could see two or three percent, but this seems like a pretty big stretch. Then again, I'm not a VC.

The valuation is not based solely on last year's revenue. Revenue doesn't really matter at this point.

And that's not even looking at profits vs valuation...

It's both insane and not unreasonable. If Anthropic's internal version of Claude Code gets so good that they can recreate all of google's products quickly there's no moat anymore.

If AI is winner take all, then the value is effectively infinite. Obviously insane, but maybe it's winner take most?

> The company said its run-rate revenue has increased from around $1 billion at the beginning of 2025, to more than $5 billion in August.

So 10% of valuation for 1.5% of revenue, which grew 5x in last 6 months. Doesn't seem as unrealistic as you put it, if it has good gross margin which some expects to be 60%.

Also Google was valued at $350B when it had $5B revenue.[1]

[1]: https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/marketcap/

It's just off by a factor of 35?

I thought the same when choosing to invest in Intel rather than NVidia in 2022. At the time, Intel was worth $310B while NVidia was worth $650B, yet Intel's revenue was $80B/year while NVidia's was $25B. I was like "There's no way I'm paying 2x the price for 1/3 the revenue." Now, NVidia is worth $4T (a return of roughly 7x) on revenue of $165B, and Intel is worth $105B (a return of roughly -66%) on revenue of $53B.

Investors are forward looking, and market conditions can change abruptly. If Anthropic actually displaces Google, it's amazingly cheap at 10% of Alphabet's market cap. (Ironically, I even knew that NVidia was displacing Intel at the time I invested, but figured that the magnitude of the transition couldn't possibly be worth the price differential. News flash: companies can go to zero, and be completely replaced by others, and when that happens their market caps just swap.)

So all it takes is Anthropic 35x-ing their revenue once they start selling ad spots? That sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Right now nobody wants to be the first to offer advertising in LLM services, but LLM conversation history provides a wealth of data for ad targeting. And in more permissive jurisdictions you can have the LLM deliver ads organically in the conversation or just shift the opinions and biases of the model through a short mention in the system message

Valuation includes expected future growth, it's not just present value of future revenue given today's numbers.

You may not agree with the market's estimation of that, but comparing just present revenue isn't really the right comparison.

It's the techno-hubristic version of Pascal's wager. The reward for the existence of God is infinite, so it worth investing all the money in the world to create one.

To make a similar comparison, Alphabet's Waymo has AV's that actually work. But they're not capturing 80% of Tesla's valuation.

No, all it takes is Anthropic 35x-ing their revenue while Alphabet revenue somehow stays the same despite Alphabet already having a product perfectly competitive with Anthropic and which can use the same revenue growth strategy.

As I said, insane. And that’s not even considering the 10 to 15% shares of Anthropic actually owned by Alphabet.

Anthropic competes solely in one of Alphabet multiple markets and that’s a market where Google already has a compelling competitive offer. This valuation gap doesn’t make any sense to me.

A rounding error, really.

Investors are forward looking, except when it's micron in 2000.

Anthropic have several similiar competitors with actual real distribution and tech. Ones that can go 10x are underdogs like Google before IPO or Amazon, or Shopify etc. Anthropic current stock is beyond that. Investors no longer give any big opp. to public. They gain it via private funding

Here is another way to look at it: Anthropic is a put option on Google worth 10% of Google price. Expires when they run out of funds.

Is there no moat for previous account and user buy-in?

Convincing billions of users to make a new account and do all their e-mail on a new domain? A new YouTube channel with all new subscribers? Migrate all their google drive and AdSense accounts to another company, etc?

This is trivially simple and creates no moat?

Tech Companies are valued at a multiple of next 12 months revenue, not last 12 months revenue. Since anthropic grew from $1billion to $5billion in revenue in ~8 months, that means it ~10x'ed revenue y/y off of 1 billion base. If you assume even 60% of that growth is retained (low for traditional saas businesses, but who knows), then anthropic is ~10% of google in terms of revenue in mid ~2027.

Basically, 5x-ing revenue in 8 months off of a billion dollars starting revenue is insane. Growing this quickly at this scale breaks every traditional valuation metric.

(And no - this doesn't include margins or COGS).

> " If Anthropic's internal version of Claude Code gets so good that they can recreate all of google's products quickly"

I know you aren't asserting this but rather just putting the argument out there, but to me at least it's interesting comparing a company that has vendor lock-in and monopoly or duopoly status in various markets vs one that doesn't.

I'd argue that Google's products themselves haven't been their moat for decades -- their moat is "default search engine status" in the tiny number of Browsers That Matter (Arguably just Chrome and Mobile Safari), being entrenched as the main display ad network, duopoly status as an OS vendor (Android), and monopoly status on OS vendor for low-end education laptops (ChromeOS). If somehow those were all suddenly eliminated, I think Google would be orders of magnitude less valuable.

Don't those cost like $400,000 a piece to outfit, though? I mean this with tremendous respect because I think they're the only ones doing it "right," I feel like Waymo is kind of 'bruteforcing' autonomous driving using money. There's an inherent limit to the impact of a technology (and thus its long-term value) based on its cost, and even stipulating that Waymo has solved it in general, I think a valuation should be contingent on a roadmap which shows how it's going to scale out -- this seems like an as-yet unsolved problem until someone shows how to combine the reliability of the tech-heavy Waymo system with the price tag of a Tesla.

"Google’s advertising revenue in 2024 was about $264.6 billion"

Somebody above said that Anthropic might reach $9 billion ARR by the end of this year.

Someone mentioned their projected ARR for 2025 is 9b. Which makes sense intuitively looking at how much I spent with them this year. So the valuation looks a bit more sane with those numbers.

How old was alphabet in 2024? And anthropic?

How much was google revenue in 2003? It was 1.5 billions (2.6 in today's USD)

Not saying the price is justified, but the comparison is not very fair.

Historically speaking there was an 80 year period in which transporting mined, natural, lake ice from the US Northeast/Norway around the world was economically competitive with ice machines depending on local market conditions.

Machine ice became competitive in India and Australia in the 1850s, but it took until the start of World War 1 (1914) for artificial ice production to surpass natural in America. And the industry only disappeared when every household could buy a refrigerator.

Self-driving doesn't have to scale globally to be economically viable as a technology. It could already be viable at $400k in HCOL areas with perfect weather (i.e. California, Austin, and other places they operate).

That's like asking if it's better to launch on Falcon 9, or wait until Starship actually hits $100 a kilogram to orbit.

One of the most interesting statistics about Waymo is how few of them there are. The only service area with what you could call a large number of vehicles is the Bay Area. The news reports I've seen about it say under 1000 there and fewer than 3000 nationally. Uber's CEO was quoted as saying that a Waymo completes more rides than 99% of Uber drivers. It's a pity he didn't make a comparison against the median Uber driver. But it's plausible that a Waymo could replace 10 Uber drivers or more. That ratio flows through to revenue.

__350x-ing__, not 35

Anthropic valuation is 10% of Google. The 35 to get equivalent multiple is correct (well actually closer to 7 as another comment thread rightfully pointed that Anthropic is apparently on track to multiply their revenue by 5 in 2025).