Anthropic Files to Go Public

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Top News Anthropic released its IPO prospectus today, laying out a stark vision of AI’s future: the technology could help cure cancer and Alzheimer’s, accelerate economic growth, and improve government services while also enabling cyberattacks, biological weapons, authoritarian surveillance, and even “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” The New York Times has more here, and here is a link to the prospectus. Anthropic’s revenue jumped 1,368% year over year in the second quarter, while its first-half operating loss narrowed to $693 million. More than half of Fortune 500 companies and over 30% of the Global 2000 generated at least $100,000 each in revenue for Anthropic over the latest 12 months, but the company has also committed more than $600 billion to computing deals as it races to expand capacity. Reuters has more here. Anthropic’s IPO prospectus reveals an unusually elaborate governance structure designed to keep control away from ordinary shareholders: an independent trust can appoint four of seven directors, the founders control a fixed 50.1% of voting power for the remaining seats, employees can break certain board disputes through a special class of stock, and major backers Amazon and Google get no votes at all. Bloomberg has more here. Sponsored By … "Which of my portfolio companies are burning cash unreasonably?" Answering that used to mean days of digging through files. Now it's just one prompt away. Ask questions, analyze trends, build visualizations, and draft reports across your entire portfolio in minutes, powered by your AI super-associate - PortfolioIQ. Anthropic’s IPO Filing Reveals Its Strategy for Keeping Enterprise Customers Hooked Image Credits: Pavlo Gonchar / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty Images By Rebecca Bellan Anthropic is building the same kind of cross-product ecosystem that helped make tech companies like Amazon and Uber enormously sticky, and its S-1 suggests the strategy is working. More than half of customers spending at least $100,000 annually now use both the Claude platform and a first-party app like Claude Code or Cowork, up from about 30% at the end of last year. “The speed and depth of our enterprise customer adoption are powerful evidence of Claude’s position at the frontier of AI,” the S-1, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, reads. As of September 30, Anthropic recorded more than 11,900 customers spending at least $100,000; more than 1,900 customers spending upward of $1 million; and about 250 customers spending $10 million or more annually. Anthropic attributes customer momentum to a “significant usage expansion as customers realize the value of deploying Claude across their organizations,” which drove net revenue retention of about 900% as of the end of the third quarter. Throwing shade at the entire legacy SaaS industry, Anthropic pitches Claude as not a “static product that serves a single use case,” but rather “frontier AI with rapidly advancing capabilities” spanning the models, the developer platform, and the applications users interact with directly. “An advance at any layer compounds across all three layers, accelerating the pace at which we can deliver more capable intelligence,” the filing reads, calling this “integrated approach” the reason more customers use both the Claude Platform and first-party apps. The playbook is familiar. Uber began by selling rides but has expanded into food delivery and freight. With AWS, Amazon drew in customers with cloud computing services before expanding those relationships into storage, databases, and other offerings, making the ecosystem increasingly hard to leave. Like those companies, Anthropic doesn’t have to sell each product to a brand-new buyer: A business that starts with the API can deploy Claude Code to their engineers and then Cowork to their broader workforce. Massive Fundings Bedrock Robotics, a two-year-old San Francisco startup that builds autonomous systems that retrofit construction equipment, raised a $600 million Series C round at a $4.1 billion post-money valuation. The deal was co-led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital, with US Innovative Technology Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Temasek as well as previous investors 8VC, Georgian, Valor Equity Partners, Xora, Eclipse, Perry Creek Capital, and NVIDIA also participating. The company has raised a total of nearly $1 billion. TechCrunch has more here. Hexagon Bio, a 10-year-old Menlo Park company that develops antibody-drug conjugates with novel cancer-killing payloads derived from molecules found in microbial genomes, raised a $62 million Series C round led by The Column Group, with previous investors Nextech Invest, Deviation Capital, 8VC, and CPP Investments also investing. More here. Nevis, a two-year-old New York startup that automates paperwork and other routine work for financial advisors with AI agents, raised a $70 million Series B round at a $500 million valuation. The deal was led by EQT Ventures, with additional support from QuantumLight and Charles Schwab as well as previous investors Sequoia Capital, ICONIQ, and Ribbit Capital. The company has raised a total of $110 million. Fortune has more here. Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings Adsilico, a two-year-old startup based in Leeds, UK, that uses generative AI and simulations to test medical devices across diverse virtual patient populations, raised a $13.4 million Series A round led by PXN Ventures, with previous investors Northern Gritstone and Parkwalk also anteing up. The company has raised a total of $18.1 million. Tech Funding News has more here. Coast, a six-year-old New York startup that provides payment cards and expense management tools for businesses managing vehicle fleets, field workers, and job-related spending, raised a $35 million round led by previous investor Thomvest Ventures, with Intuit Ventures, Small World Capital, and Alpha Square Group as well as previous investors ICONIQ Growth, Accel, Insight Partners, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Avid Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners, Colle Capital, Synchrony, RXR, and The Fintech Fund also piling on. More here. Nous, a five-year-old London startup that develops an AI agent that manages household bills, switches providers, cancels subscriptions, and handles administrative tasks, raised a $17 million round co-led by Heartcore Capital and previous investor Mosaic Ventures, with Chalfen Ventures, Joyance Partners, and Bain Future Back Ventures also pitching in. The company has raised a total of around $26 million. Tech Funding News has more here. Overwatch, a four-year-old New York startup that uses AI agents to detect cyberattacks, fraud, and other digital threats, raised a $15 million Series A round led by Mouro Capital, with Visa Ventures and Capital One Ventures as well as previous investors PruVen Capital, New Era Capital Partners, and Y Combinator also pitching in. Crypto Briefing has more here. Smaller Fundings BioStack, a one-year-old San Francisco startup that connects fragmented hospital records and creates de-identified datasets for medical research, drug development, and training healthcare AI models, raised a $9.5 million seed round. Investors included Peak XV, Afore Capital, DCVC, Emerson Collective, SV Angel, Verdict Capital, Streamlined Ventures, and Y Combinator. More here. BOB, a Miami startup founded this year that uses an AI financial assistant to handle bookkeeping, invoicing, payments, and cash-flow tracking for small businesses, raised a $5.5 million seed round led by Mischief, with Peter Thiel, Codie Sanchez, Mark Pincus, and Karman Ventures also chiming in. Refresh Miami has more here. Colare, a one-year-old San Francisco startup that provides simulation-based technical assessments that help hardware companies screen engineering candidates before interviews, raised a $2.5 million pre-seed round. 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The company has raised a total of $5.56 million. The Block has more here. Sponsored By … SRS Acquiom. The Smartest Way to Run a Deal™ Gain an edge with our most comprehensive M&A earnouts and claims study to date. The SRS Acquiom 2026 M&A Earnouts and Claims Study provides deep insights from 1,174 private-target acquisitions valued over $1T, with 366 individual indemnification claims, 870 expense funds, and 405 earnout metrics analyzed. The dataset spans two decades of closed deals, the majority of which closed in the last three years. This collection of data isn’t available anywhere else. Access the exclusive insights. New Funds Trust Ventures, an eight-year-old Austin VC firm that backs startups in regulated industries, is raising $400 million for its fifth flagship fund. More here. Interlagos Capital, a two-year-old VC firm based in El Segundo, CA, that backs deep-tech and advanced-manufacturing startups, is raising $400 million for its second flagship fund, more than twice the $183.4 million reported size of Fund I. More here. Exits DoorDash is in advanced talks to acquire Instacart in a deal that could be completed as soon as this week and value the grocery-delivery company at around $17 billion. The Wall Street Journal has more here. Intel has agreed to acquire Classiq, a six-year-old quantum software startup based in Tel Aviv that has raised more than $200 million, as the chipmaker looks to build a full-stack quantum computing business spanning its own hardware and software that can also run on rivals’ machines. Terms were not disclosed. Bloomberg has more here. Going Public Lycia Therapeutics, a six-year-old biotech based in South San Francisco, CA, that is developing protein-degrading therapies for allergies and autoimmune diseases, raised $317.5 million in an upsized Nasdaq IPO, with shares closing their first day up nearly 67% at $30. Lycia has raised a total of $300+ million from investors including Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners, Balyasny Asset Management, Janus Henderson Investors, Redmile Group, Versant Ventures, Eli Lilly, OrbiMed, Adage Capital Management, HBM Healthcare Investments, Invus, RTW Investments, Franklin Templeton, and Alexandria Venture Investments. Fierce Biotech has more here. RedotPay, a three-year-old stablecoin payments startup based in Hong Kong, is reportedly preparing a confidential U.S. IPO filing by year-end and is in talks to raise a pre-IPO round at a $4 billion to $5 billion valuation. Bloomberg has more here. People Slack cofounder Stewart Butterfield says he only had about an hour of face time with Marc Benioff before Salesforce agreed to buy Slack for $27.7 billion, with one meeting cut short when Matthew McConaughey arrived. After the deal closed, Butterfield repeatedly pushed Benioff on what he viewed as Salesforce’s operational dysfunction while Slack employees concluded that Benioff himself didn’t use Slack and “didn’t really get it.” Building Slack has more here. Elon Musk predicted on X that the 200-plus neoclouds that rent GPUs for AI workloads are destined to “guppy-level death and consolidation,” arguing that debt markets are closing to pure-play compute providers. His tweet comes on the heels of SpaceX securing roughly $40 billion in Apollo-backed financing for Nvidia chips and related equipment. TechCrunch has more here. The New York Times profiles Marissa Mayer, the former Yahoo CEO and early Google executive who is back with Dazzle, an AI assistant that mines users’ camera rolls to help with everyday tasks and is aimed in part at busy women. More here. Layoffs Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to roughly 60,000 employees - more than a quarter of its 223,000-person workforce - as it looks to cut costs and reshape staffing for the AI era; eligible workers include employees in Xbox, Windows, Copilot, and finance. Business Insider first reported the move. TechCrunch has more here. Post-Its Data Image Credits: Max Woolf’s Blog OpenAI and Anthropic have cut LLM prices by as much as 80% in recent months even as demand for AI models has soared, a counterintuitive trend driven by intense competition, rapidly improving models, and pressure from cheaper open-weight alternatives. Data scientist Max Woolf has more here. California startups have already raised $385 billion in 2026, more than all U.S. startups raised in any prior year on record and more than double California’s 2025 total; the state has captured more than three-fourths of U.S. startup funding, with OpenAI and Anthropic accounting for over half. Crunchbase News has more here. Essential Reads Cathedral, a months-old cybersecurity startup founded by former DOGE staffers and valued at $1.4 billion, used AI agents for less than 12 hours to penetrate third-party software connected to Anthropic and access meeting transcripts, salary and job-offer details, and Slack discussions about advanced models. Anthropic says no customer chats, code, or model weights were exposed. The Washington Post has more here. Google DeepMind’s AI weather model correctly predicted that Hurricane Isaias would hit Florida’s western Panhandle even as conventional models initially pointed farther west, underscoring how quickly AI forecasting is improving; meteorologists say advances that once took a decade can now happen within a year. NPR has more here. DraftKings is facing mounting scrutiny from Congress and regulators in several states after The New York Times reported that it used AI to identify customers likely to keep gambling and losing when sent promotions; DraftKings denies targeting customers based on their losses. The New York Times has more here. The California shopping mall that doubled as Twin Pines Mall in Back to the Future could become a 10-megawatt data center, part of a proposed redevelopment of the largely vacant property that has already drawn opposition from local residents. Fast Company has more here. Startups are turning friendship into a paid service, matching strangers for dinners, hikes, and other offline activities as loneliness rises. 222, which charges $22 a month plus event costs, tripled revenue last year and expects to quadruple it this year to the high seven figures. The New York Times has more here. Detours Boston’s Logan Airport drew more than 5,000 applicants for a contest to become its new voice, with contestants judged partly on whether they could pronounce “Gloucester” correctly and Ben Affleck contributing a parody warning visitors against calling the city “Beantown.” Dictionary.com has named “maxxing” its 2026 Word of the Year, reflecting the internet’s obsession with optimizing everything from looks and sleep to AI use at work as the term has spread well beyond its roots in gaming and manosphere culture. Brain Rot Happy National Pumpkin Day! Retail Therapy A 22-acre private island compound on Canada’s Rainy Lake has quietly hit the market for $10 million after its owner spent three decades restoring and expanding the 1930s estate, which includes roughly 9,500 square feet of living space, 10 bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, and an additional 330 acres of land. Tips (the non-pecuniary kind) Please send all of your hot gossip to [email protected] or [email protected]. Want to advertise on StrictlyVC? To book ads directly, contact us at [email protected].