Anthropic's IPO Valuation To Rest On $190-200 Bn Revenue Bet For 2028

Wall Street is looking further into the future than it usually does to value Anthropic ahead of what could be one of the biggest IPOs on record, basing the AI company's valuation on how much revenue it could generate two years from now, according to a Reuters report.

Anthropic is reportedly projecting 2028 revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, a figure not previously reported. The projection dwarfs the $47 billion revenue run rate, reflecting the company's current pace of business, that Anthropic publicised as recently as May, and underlines the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite.

Notably, bankers and investors are using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on these forecasts, the report 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. This reflects the pace at which Anthropic's business is expanding, as well as the challenge of setting benchmarks for a company still spending heavily to build out its AI infrastructure, the report added.

The pace of spending on AI investment has driven pullbacks in several popular tech stocks in recent months, including some firms viewed as comparable to Anthropic.

There is precedent for this approach among other fast-growing companies that have recently gone public. Backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue expectations ahead of the firm's IPO this year, while SpaceX's projections extended as far as 2029 before the company went public at a record valuation in June, Reuters reported.

Margins Under Pressure From Heavy Spending

The approach reflects the difficulty of valuing an AI company whose margins are still being pressured by heavy 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.

Cloud infrastructure company Cloudflare, enterprise software company Palantir and Elon Musk's SpaceX are among the public companies reportedly being considered as reference points for Anthropic's valuation ahead of its analyst day. Public-market comparables are a key part of the IPO valuation process, giving investors a benchmark for how companies with similar growth profiles and business models are valued, and helping determine which revenue or earnings multiples apply to a company's forecasts.

Palantir is valued at 53 times this year's expected revenue, among the priciest stocks on Wall Street. SpaceX and Cloudflare both trade at 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, according to LSEG data.

Each of the three companies offers a different comparison point for Anthropic, the report said. Palantir is a reference for businesses with rapid growth and AI exposure. Cloudflare offers a comparison with a high-growth software and infrastructure company. SpaceX provides an example of a company valued partly on expectations for future scale rather than its current financial profile.

Why Current Earnings Don't Tell The Full Story

Established companies are typically valued more heavily on earnings, or EBITDA, which gives investors a sense of the underlying economics of the business. For Anthropic, current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect the company to achieve at scale, the report added.

Anthropic is spending large amounts on GPUs and other computing capacity, model training, inference and hiring. These expenses are necessary to support its rapid expansion but could shrink as a share of revenue as the business grows.

The company's financial trajectory shows how quickly this equation is changing. Anthropic's revenue run rate was about $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to the company, before rising to more than $47 billion by May. Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, and is on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.

The company has said its revenue run rate grew more than 10-fold annually in each of the three years through early 2026. This growth is a key reason investors are willing to look as far ahead as 2028 when applying a revenue multiple to the company.