Anthropic grows almost 50% but sample IPO expectations cool down
Model builder Anthropic is still growing at lightning speed, but not fast enough for investors. This is what you need to know about the trade fair launch.
Anthropic continues to grow at lightning speed, but less rapidly than some investors had hoped. The AI company behind Claude posted approximately $16.8 billion in revenue in the third quarter.
That is almost 50 percent more than the 11.5 billion dollars of the second quarter. Nevertheless, the growth rate is clearly lower than earlier this year. Between the first and second quarters, sales more than doubled.
Remarkably, according to investors, Anthropic was profitable on an adjusted basis for the second quarter in a row. The adjusted operating margin was around 11 percent.
The company would also generate $1.70 in revenue for every dollar it spends on computing power. This is important because investors are increasingly wondering whether the huge investments in chips and data centers will yield sufficient returns.
In July, Anthropic's annualized revenue was around $65 billion. Based on the new figures, research firm SemiAnalysis estimates that this is now around 74 billion dollars.
That's strong, but less than the expectations that went around last summer. At the time, some investors were still counting on over $100 billion in annualized sales by the end of the year.
The bar has therefore clearly been lowered.
There are several reasons for this. Meta and Microsoft, two major customers of Anthropic, are increasingly using their own models. In addition, OpenAI has become more competitive again since the launch of a new model in July.
Chinese parties are also pushing prices down. Anthropic has also scaled back use by rivals for so-called distillation. That previously accounted for 5 to 7 percent of sales.
Anthropic is still aiming for an IPO in November and would be valued at around $965 billion. This could make it one of the largest IPOs ever.
But most of all, investors will want to know if current profitability holds up when Anthropic continues to invest hundreds of billions in infrastructure.
Growth is still spectacular. However, the market is now less impressed by growth alone and is increasingly looking at cash flows, margins and the sustainability of investments.