Exclusive-Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200 billion 2028 revenue forecast, sources say

Aug 14 (Reuters) - As Anthropic prepares for what could be one of the biggest IPOs on record, Wall Street is looking further into the future than it commonly does to put a price on the AI company, valuing it based on how much revenue it could generate two years from now.

Anthropic is projecting 2028 ‌revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, according to two people familiar with the company's financials, a figure that has not previously been reported. The projection dwarfs the $47 billion revenue "run rate," reflecting ‌the firm's current pace of business, that the company publicized as recently as May, and shows the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite.

Bankers and investors are using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on forecasts, four sources said.

Using revenue multiples is ​common for high-growth software companies that have yet to establish a mature profit profile.

But looking two years ahead is less typical, reflecting the speed at which Anthropic's business is expanding and the challenges of setting benchmarks for a company still spending heavily to build out its AI infrastructure, the people said.

The pace of spending on AI investment has been responsible for pullbacks in many of the most popular tech stocks in recent months, including some of the firms viewed as comparable to Anthropic.

There have been precedents among some of the fastest-growing companies that hit the market recently. Backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue expectations in the runup ‌to the firm's IPO this year, and SpaceX projections extended as far ⁠as 2029 before the company went public at a record valuation in June, the people said.

The approach reflects the difficulty of valuing an AI company whose margins are still being pressured by enormous spending on computing power, model training and hiring. Investors are betting that as Anthropic grows, revenue will rise faster than ⁠the costs required to support that growth, allowing margins to expand.