Anthropic is to be short on private markets; SpaceX can spoil the party | TechCrunch

Glen Anderson has been selling private company shares since 2010, back when the number of institutional investors focusing on the recent private equity market can be counted on two hands. He says today there are thousands.

As president of investment bank Rainmaker Securities, which focuses exclusively on private equity markets and manages transactions in about 1,000 stocks, Anderson has a front seat to one of the greatest periods in the history of the secondary market. And for now, he suggests, the story has three main players: Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX.

The result: the story is more complex than the headlines suggest.

Anderson’s reading at Anthropic is consistent with what Bloomberg reported earlier this week: demand for the company’s shares is relatively unsatisfied. Bloomberg quoted Ken Smythe, the founder and CEO of Next Round Capital, as saying that customers have shown his outfit that they have $ 2 billion of money ready to be spent on Anthropic, and even about $ 600 million in shares of OpenAI that investors are trying to sell have not found takers.

Anderson sees something similar in Rainmaker. “The hardest stock to find in our market is Anthropic,” he told TechCrunch yesterday afternoon from his home in Miami. “There aren’t just vendors.”

One of the things that undermined that demand, Anderson says, was Anthropic’s public confrontation with the Department of Defense — a turn of events that initially seemed like bad news for the company but has turned out to be a gift.

“The app became more popular, people surrounded the company as a hero, they took on the big government,” he said. “I think it strengthened the story and made it more distinct from OpenAI.”

This distinction continues to be meaningful to investors who navigate the market where, for years, the prevailing mindset was to bet on everyone. Anderson notes that many institutional investors are still seeking exposure to Anthropic and OpenAI. “The jury is still out,” he said, where the AI ​​model will win — but the pace, at least in the secondary market, has changed.

That doesn’t mean OpenAI has fallen off the cliff. Anderson pushes back a bit on the binary quantification of the situation.

He said: “I can’t say it’s a one-person conversation.

But happiness is not there. “It’s not nearly as strong a market as Anthropic right now,” he admitted.

When measuring the value, Anderson fully confirmed the Bloomberg report that OpenAI shares in the secondary market are being sold as if the company was worth $765 billion – a good discount on the company’s new price of $852 billion. He cautioned that he was working off the top of his head, but said Bloomberg’s numbers “are in the right range.”

OpenAI itself has tried to provide more control over the second business. “People should be very careful about any firm that wants to access OpenAI’s equity, including an SPV,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg, noting that the company has created channels authorized by banks, without fees, to counter what it described as a model of high-cost traders.

Perhaps most tellingly — at least for now — banks including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have begun offering OpenAI shares to their high-net-worth clients without charging carrying fees, according to Bloomberg. Goldman, meanwhile, charges its usual fees — typically 15% to 20% of profits — for clients seeking exposure to Anthropic.

What neither of these reports is SpaceX, which is unique among the changing opinions around these powerful models. Anderson describes it as one of the Rainmaker universe names that didn’t get the correction that hit most of the private market between 2022 and 2024, a time when the shares of many private companies fell by 60% to 70% from their peak (after their valuations were quickly raised).

The rocket and satellite behemoth “has always been up and to the right,” Anderson said.

Anderson, who, naturally, has an economic desire to praise the company and its previous supporters, thanks the managers of SpaceX for the controlled prices and not removing every last dollar from every financial opportunity or simple proposal.

“Many companies will fall into the temptation to increase the price of their stock every time,” he said. The problem is that that leaves no room for error.

SpaceX, on the other hand, played it safe, by “not being too greedy,” and the payoff for early investors has been huge. “You can imagine if somebody came into 2015 what kind of profit they’re sitting on right now,” Anderson said.

To put a positive spin on that idea: SpaceX was valued at about $12 billion in 2015, while Google and Fidelity shared $1 billion in the company. The other person who came in at that price is now sitting on a profit of more than 100x, and the company is worth more than $1 trillion before the planned IPO.

That IPO is just around the corner, it seems. SpaceX filed for bankruptcy this week for an initial public offering, setting the stage for what could be one of the largest IPOs in history, with Elon Musk reportedly aiming to raise between $50 billion and $75 billion, possibly by June. Only the beginning of 2019 of Saudi Aramco, which took the energy giant for $ 1.7 trillion, is close.

Not surprisingly, the filing has already changed the dynamics of the secondary market for SpaceX shares, according to Anderson.

“Today, I saw a flood of SpaceX investors coming to me and saying, ‘Can you give me SpaceX?'” he said. “It’s been an active buy side.” But the supply is drying up. As a company nears an IPO, shareholders who already have little incentive to sell because they see a cash-flow event are just around the corner.

That’s where things get a little dicey for OpenAI and Anthropic. Both companies are reportedly reviewing their public offerings and have indicated they may move this year. But SpaceX, by filling in first, is about to test the market’s appetite in a big way, and Anderson suggested that whoever is next will be at a disadvantage.

“SpaceX is going to make a lot of money,” he said. There is only so much money available for IPOs. The first traveler reaches the pit first; those who follow face greater scrutiny and, perhaps, less money.

It is a powerful thing that plays everything that is said to be straight and that AI companies are not completely safe, although the care is still there now. Time your IPO too early and you’re the one trying to take the market by storm. Wait for someone else to go first, and you may find the biggest checks already written.

You can hear more about our interview with Anderson in an upcoming episode of the StrictlyVC Download podcast, which drops every Tuesday. In the meantime, check out the latest episodes, including ones with Whoop CEO Will Ahmed and investor Bill Gurley.