Anthropic to Buy Back Employee Shares at $61.5 Billion Valuation
The Takeaway
• The 4-year-old startup will buy shares from staff, former employees
• The buyback follows a $3.5 billion capital raising
• Startups are using share sales to reward employees
Anthropic is offering to buy back shares from hundreds of current and former employees, the first transaction of its kind for the four-year-old company. The buyback is a sign of how integral these have become in rewarding employees at fast-growing startups and retaining rare research talent in the artificial intelligence talent war.
San Francisco–based Anthropic is allowing current and former employees who worked for the company for at least two years to sell up to 20% of their equity, with a maximum of $2 million each, the person said. The buyback values the AI startup at $61.5 billion, the same valuation as in its March fundraising, according to a person familiar with the transaction, which could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.
The buyback should be finalized by the end of the month, the person said. The company, founded by former OpenAI researchers, currently employs more than 800 people, up from about 300 at the end of 2023.
Large secondaries have become commonplace among startups nearing the decade mark, which is around the time many have historically gone public. OpenAI, now nearly a decade old, has allowed employees and ex-employees to collectively sell about $2.7 billion worth of shares in the past few years. Last year, design company Figma and enterprise software firm Databricks similarly allowed some employees to sell hundreds of millions’ worth of shares.
Not every startup allows former employees to cash in their stock. Data-labeling firm Scale AI, which is close to finalizing a $150 million share sale valuing it at around $25 billion, is excluding ex-employees from the transaction.
While many of those startups have arranged sales of employee stock to investors, profitable startups ByteDance and Stripe have bought back employee shares. This strategy can limit the number of new investors in a company and involves less work than a share sale.
Anthropic is still burning cash. But it has just raised $3.5 billion in capital led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing its total raised to more than $15 billion. The latest valuation is equivalent to $56.09 per share, according to a filing.
In March, Anthropic passed $1.4 billion in annualized revenue, implying monthly revenue of around $116 million. That was up about 40% from the $1 billion in annualized revenue Anthropic hit at the end of 2024.