Anthropic at $60B 🤯. How much might employee stock options be worth?

According to Crunchbase, Anthropic has raised $14.7B to date. The WSJ reports that they’re working on raising another $2B at a $60B valuation. That’s a total of $16.7B committed / raised.

Given that I’m an operator and not a professional investor, I was curious to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations on what would need to be true for stock options to be worth something. Note: all of this is based on public information.

SaaS valuation multiples: 7x

Anthropic’s run-rate revenue in December 2024 was $1B, up 10x (!!) year-over-year. The AI market is on fire 🔥🔥, as investors rightly recognize that AI is an incredibly disruptive technology.

SaaS companies today have a median valuation of around 7x run-rate revenue. AI company multiples are raising at significant premiums to 7x (with a median premium of 25x). However, these multiples are all capital-raising transactions and not liquidity events. So, for this exercise, I’m conservatively assuming a 7x multiple on revenue, as there have been plenty of liquidity events at this multiple.

Liquidation preference

Liquidation preference determines how investors are paid in the event of a liquidation event (e.g., acquisition). Investors have endlessly creative ways to engineer liquidation preference structures (this article explores liquidation preference more in depth).

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume that Anthropic has raised their capital with a simple non-participating 1x liquidation preference. This tends to be the most common-shareholder friendly structure, and given the demand for Anthropic, I think it’s likely they were able to get capital on these terms.

In this structure, any preferred stockholder can receive either 1) the money they invested back or 2) convert their preferred stock into common stock and get a percentage of the outcome. In a simple example, imagine an investor has invested $1M for 20% of the company, post-money. If the company is sold for $2M cash, the investor would likely elect option 1, and get $1M back. The remaining $1M would be divided among the common shareholders. If the company is sold for $100M, the investor would elect to convert their shares to common. In this case, the investor would have 20% of common, and net $20M.

Scenario 1: Anthropic grows 2.4x

In order for the common stock to be worth more than $0, the valuation of the company needs to be more than the liquidation preference of $16.7B. Using the 7x multiple as our guide, this implies a revenue of $2.4B.

Given the 10x revenue growth from 2023 to 2024, it seems likely that $2.4B in run rate revenue in 2025 is a reasonable floor on revenue.

Scenario 2: Anthropic grows 8.5x 🚀

Investors don’t invest just to get their money back. They invest in companies to return on capital. So to get to $60B, the company has to get to $8.5B in revenue (8.5x YoY revenue growth). This is hard.

Consider that the revenue cutoff for the in 2024 Fortune 500 is $7.1B. If Anthropic hits $8.5B in revenue, it would rank #446 on the 2024 Fortune 500 list, just behind ServiceNow (#432) and DoorDash (#443), and just ahead of Electronic Arts (#482).

In this situation, while the outcome is still not good for investors, the common stockholders can be confident that their stock options are quite valuable.

Churn: the biggest risk

In my opinion, the biggest risk to Anthropic is churn. When you scale a business from $100M to $1B so quickly, there is zero track record of churn. Who knows how much of that $900M in new recurring revenue will renew? Right now, we’re in an AI arms race to develop the best model. New entrants (hello, DeepSeek) can disrupt existing technologies, and switching costs are relatively low.

So what’s the likelihood the options are actually worth something?

TL, DR: it depends on when the options were granted.

Stock options are the right (but not obligation) to purchase stock at a specific price, known as the strike price (aka grant price aka exercise price). For private companies, the strike price is set at least once a year. It is also re-calculated after a funding round. This is known as the 409A valuation.

If you’re getting stock options recently at a high 409A valuation (e.g., ~$60B), my view is that the likelihood you’re going to get significant value from these options is low. If you got stock options a year (or more) ago, they are almost certainly worth something.

Finally, Anthropic may recognize the challenge it faces with employee stock compensation with a $60B valuation, and might issue restricted stock units instead.

Thanks for reading this far. If you get nothing else from this post, just recognize that investor valuations don’t necessarily translate into money in your pocket!