Eric Schmidt owns approximately 1% of Anthropic, a position acquired by investing tens of millions of dollars in the AI lab's Series A round in 2021, when the company was valued at $461 million, according to Bloomberg1,2. Bloomberg reported that Schmidt is poised to have one of the largest windfalls from Anthropic's IPO.
Schmidt's holding is roughly half the 2% stake held by Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei. TechCrunch reported that at top-end market estimates valuing Anthropic at as much as $2 trillion, Schmidt's stake would be worth as much as $20 billion, on top of a current net worth that Bloomberg puts at $57.5 billion.
The size of Schmidt's stake reflects Anthropic's unusual early fundraising history. Until 2023, the company lacked the marquee institutional investors that later joined its cap table; its first three funding rounds were backed mostly by angels and high-net-worth individuals, according to Bloomberg reporter Natasha Mascarenhas3. Firms such as Sequoia Capital entered relatively late.
Schmidt has been an active technology investor since stepping down as Google CEO in 2011, deploying capital through Tomorrow Ventures, Innovation Endeavors Management, and his family office, Hillspire. His other AI-related investments include Mistral, General Intuition, and Reflection AI.
Neither Schmidt nor Anthropic responded to requests for comment.
ANALYSIS The disclosure puts a concrete dollar figure on the returns available to Anthropic's earliest individual backers, a cohort whose collective ownership has received less attention than the institutional rounds that followed.