Two ways to buy Anthropic before the IPO (while paying 50% less)
Anthropic confidentially filed their S1 with an intention of an IPO later this year. I don't have any special context of the company's financial health other than what's publicly available to anyone here, therefore I'm not making the case that Anthropic is a good business to purchase based on fundamentals. Rather, if you were already planning on investing in the IPO, I'm seeing an unusual trend among two public entities that produces a value opportunity worth considering.
**Here's the main idea**
Today Anthropic is funded by two major public entities - Amazon (\~21% ownership) and Alphabet (15%) ownership. The remaining is owned by founders, staff and other early investors. So at the simplest level you can say buying shares into each company gets your some ownership of Anthropic.
But with a keener eye into their financials this might be a much better trade than buying at IPO price in the long-run. Scroll down to the income statement visuals for [Alphabet](https://getrumi.app/insights/GOOG) and [Amazon](https://getrumi.app/insights/AMZN) you'll see that each company has the same unusual line item. Can you spot it?
"Other income" represents a whopping $98 billion for Alphabet (87% of total income) and $53.4 billion for Amazon (85% of total income). For scale that's 1.5x google's search revenue and 0.75x amazon's online store revenues.
Let's dig into the sources of these incomes,
* Amazon is quite clear in their latest 10-Q that the source of this income is from converting debt to nonvoting preferred equity. So essentially they are buying into the IPO at a lower agreed upon strike price than the IPO price.
* Alphabet is keeping this closer to their chest but discloses that this net gain of $98 billion is primarily the result of net unrealized gains on their investments. Consider this for a moment, Alphabet made more from it's investments than it did from Google.. now given anthropic raised their valuation by nearly 5X in the last year and Alphabet's first investment was in 2023 it's a reasonable assumption that a larger portion of this is from the Anthropic investment.
The Anthropic IPO is rumoured to be double the valuation of their last raise - meaning if you buy at IPO price (if you can even get in at that price) you will pay a minimum 2x what Alphabet or Amazon paid. The real number is likely closer to 10x - 20x.
So to conclude, I believe that buying into these two companies offer the best value approach to get into Anthropic's IPO while having a substantial floor from all the other fantastic businesses they own. Given both of their nature of being capital allocators (in AI companies) as well as an operators, they also provide an upside into future upstarts in the same space.
**Sources:**
1. Alphabet latest quarterly financials - [https://getrumi.app/insights/GOOG](https://getrumi.app/insights/GOOG)
2. Amazon latest quarterly financials - [https://getrumi.app/insights/AMZN](https://getrumi.app/insights/AMZN)
3. Anthorpic's approx ownership [https://graniteshares.com/research/anthropic-ipo-2026-explained-from-965-billion-to-a-possible-2-trillion-listing/](https://graniteshares.com/research/anthropic-ipo-2026-explained-from-965-billion-to-a-possible-2-trillion-listing/)
**Disclosures:** My portfolio does not include either of these companies yet. My personal opinion from using and being in the target market for Anthropic's B2B product is they are best positioned to lead or at least ride the B2B monetization phase of AI, take from this what you will. Please use your personal judgement on any trades you make.
Happy investing,
Irfan (founder of Rumi)
