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Sound Ventures' $435 Million Anthropic Bet Worth About $7 Billion at IPO Target

Guy Oseary's firm owns about 0.5% of the AI developer, Bloomberg reports, a paper gain of roughly 1,500% if Anthropic lists at its $1.4 trillion target valuation.

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Sound Ventures, the venture firm run by music manager Guy Oseary, owns about 0.5% of Anthropic after investing about $435 million over several rounds since 2023, Bloomberg reported. At the $1.4 trillion valuation Anthropic is targeting in an initial public offering expected in the coming days, that stake would be worth roughly $7 billion.

Sound Ventures has invested about $435 million in Anthropic over several rounds, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg. At the target valuation that is a gain of roughly 1,500%. TechCrunch reported in October that the firm wrote a $35 million cheque in Anthropic's 2023 Series C round and added about $400 million later.

The holding would put Sound Ventures, founded in 2015 to back early-stage technology companies, among the biggest paper winners from the listing. The figure is an estimate tied to a target price. Nothing will be realised until the shares trade and any lock-up ends.

The Deal Behind the Stake

The investment followed a 2023 meeting at Oseary's Beverly Hills home with Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and actor-turned-investor Ashton Kutcher, Bloomberg reported. Salesforce Ventures introduced Oseary to Anthropic's team. Sound Ventures then joined Anthropic's first institutionally led funding round.

"This felt intuitively the right path," Oseary said of the decision.

The bet carried a conflict. Sound Ventures was already an OpenAI investor and has put more than $400 million into the ChatGPT maker, according to managing partner Effie Epstein. Kutcher sought permission from OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman before the Anthropic deal went ahead, Oseary said. "There would be no Anthropic without OpenAI for me," he said.

Kutcher left Sound Ventures earlier this year to start his own venture firm.

Other Exits in the Portfolio

The firm's AI portfolio has produced other large outcomes. It is an investor in Hugging Face, which Nvidia has agreed to buy for $13 billion, and in World Labs, which AMD has agreed to buy for $8.2 billion.

Sound Ventures is not the only early backer with a multibillion-dollar paper gain. TechCrunch reported in October that Spark Capital's $75 million investment in the same 2023 Series C round, when Anthropic was valued at $5 billion, had grown to about $7 billion.

Anthropic's listing is expected in the coming days, according to Bloomberg, which reported that the company had planned to debut before Thanksgiving but that doubts had arisen about that timing.

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