Eric Schmidt's idea of a top programmer goes to bed at 7 PM
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is set for one of the biggest personal paydays from Anthropic’s upcoming IPO. He owns about 1% of the Claude maker, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The stake goes back to a personal investment of tens of millions of dollars that Schmidt made in the AI startup’s Series A round in 2021.The timing is what makes the number stand out. Investors have been discussing a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion for Anthropic ahead of its share sale. At 1%, Schmidt’s holding would be worth somewhere between $15 billion and $20 billion. There is one open question, though. Bloomberg says it is unclear whether he has sold any part of his stake since that first cheque.
Eric Schmidt bought into Anthropic before Google did
Anthropic was only a few months old when Schmidt came in. Dario and Daniela Amodei had left OpenAI with a small group of researchers and raised $124 million in a Series A round in May 2021. Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn led the round, with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Schmidt joining him. Secondary market data puts the post-money valuation of that round at about $623 million.Google arrived much later. In late 2022, the search giant reportedly paid around $300 million for roughly 10% of Anthropic, which valued the company at about $3 billion, nearly five times the Series A price.
Schmidt, who ran Google from 2001 to 2011 and stayed on as Alphabet’s executive chairman until 2018, had placed his bet about a year and a half before his old company.Not every early backer was as lucky. Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Alameda Research put $500 million into Anthropic for a stake of about 8%. After FTX collapsed, its bankruptcy estate sold the entire holding in 2024 for roughly $1.3 billion to repay creditors.
valuation 'has slipped from the $2 trillion mark'
Anthropic confidentially submitted its draft IPO papers to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1. A public filing could come as early as October 26, with the listing expected in mid-November, as per reports.The company’s revenue has grown fast. At an investor day last week, Anthropic said its third-quarter revenue rose 45% from the previous quarter to $16.8 billion, and that it was profitable on an adjusted basis.
For context, the company made nearly $4.6 billion in revenue in all of 2025.Some investors still left that meeting talking about a valuation closer to $1.5 trillion, below the roughly $2 trillion many had expected. Their main worry was slowing growth, since revenue had more than doubled between the first and second quarters this year.Even at the lower end of that range, a single cheque written in 2021 could turn into one of the largest individual windfalls of the entire offering. That depends on Schmidt having held on to all of it.