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

As Anthropic prepares for a potential record-breaking IPO, Wall Street is looking ahead to 2028 when valuing the AI company, basing its price on the projected revenue of $190 billion to $200 billion during that year. This forecast significantly exceeds the company's current revenue of $47 billion, which was disclosed in May. The substantial projected revenue demonstrates the magnitude of growth that investors are being asked to believe in.

Financial experts are using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on these projections, a common practice for high-growth software companies without a mature profit profile. However, forecasting two years into the future is less typical, reflecting the rapid expansion of Anthropic's business and the difficulty in setting benchmarks for a firm still heavily investing in AI infrastructure.

This approach mirrors the valuations of recent fast-growing companies, such as Cerebras Systems, which cited 2028 revenue expectations during its IPO, and SpaceX, which projected as far as 2029 before going public at a record valuation. The strategy emphasizes the challenge of valuing an AI company where margins are still pressured by the heavy spending on computing power, model training, and hiring.

Investors are banking on the notion that as Anthropic grows, its revenue will rise at a faster pace than the costs required to support that growth, ultimately increasing its margins. Comparable public companies, including Cloudflare, Palantir, and SpaceX, are being considered for valuation purposes. Palantir, valued at 53 times this year's expected revenue, Palantir is one of Wall Street's most expensive stocks.

Cloudflare and SpaceX offer a comparison with high-growth software and infrastructure companies and a company valued partly on future scale expectations, respectively. Anthropic's financial trajectory showcases how quickly its expenses, including GPU purchases, model training, inference, and hiring, are changing. While current EBITDA does not fully encapsulate the company's expected economics at scale, the company's revenue run rate has grown more than 10-fold annually over the past three years, leading to its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.

As a result, investors are willing to project revenue as far ahead as 2028 when applying revenue multiples, based on the expectation that Anthropic's current spending will ultimately generate higher revenue and margins. The valuation hinges on the belief that Anthropic's spending is fueling a business that will generate significantly more revenue and margins in the future.