Yasmin Razavi Converts Early Anthropic Bet Into Windfall

Forbes profiles Spark Capital partner Yasmin Razavi and reports she led a $450 million round for Anthropic in May 2023, after writing what Forbes describes as roughly a $75 million commitment that has since translated into an estimated $3 billion paper return. Forbes recounts that CEO Dario Amodei previously raised about $1.1 billion from investors including Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Bankman-Fried, and that cofounder Daniela Amodei told Forbes "AI was not viewed as this supersexy, exciting thing that you would want to invest in." Forbes quotes Razavi saying, "It was the biggest check we had written in the history of our firm." Forbes also reports Anthropic is "now valued at $380 billion" and is reportedly in talks to raise at a $900 billion valuation, with "whispers of an IPO later this year."

Investors who backed foundational AI teams early often capture outsized paper returns when compute-intensive models like GPT-3, ChatGPT, and Claude achieve rapid commercial traction. Companies building large-scale foundation models face capital-intensive pre-revenue phases because training and inference scale require significant GPU and engineering spend. Industry observers note that those capital requirements have compressed funding rounds into very large, high-stakes bets.

Reporting on multibillion-dollar private valuations, as Forbes does here, highlights a broader pattern in the AI ecosystem: private-market price discovery has moved ahead of public-market signals for frontier-model developers. Industry reporting frames these valuations and large secondary gains as drivers of renewed VC interest, liquidity events for early backers, and stronger incentives for additional ecosystem entrants, including infrastructure and tooling vendors.

CNBC reported in late April 2026 that Anthropic was in talks to raise at a $900 billion valuation, up from the $380 billion mark Forbes cites; monitor formal filings and primary sources for confirmation of valuation and IPO timing, since Forbes itself cites talks and "whispers," not formal disclosures. Observers should also track follow-on financing terms, secondary transactions that realize paper gains, and capital commitments to compute infrastructure, since those flows materially affect model training capacity and competition dynamics.