Anthropy is having a moment in private markets. SpaceX could spoil the party

Glenn Anderson has been brokering private equity trading since 2010, when it was possible to count the number of late-stage private market-focused institutional investors. Today, he says, there are thousands.

As president of investment bank Rainmaker Securities, which focuses solely on private securities markets and facilitates transactions in nearly 1,000 stocks, Anderson has a front-row seat to one of the most exciting moments in the history of the secondary market. Right now, he points out, the narrative has three main characters: Anthropy, OpenAI, and SpaceX.

The result: The story is more complicated than the headlines suggest.

Anderson’s reading of Anthropic is consistent with what Bloomberg reported earlier this week: Demand for the company’s shares has become nearly insatiable. Bloomberg quoted Ken Smith, founder and CEO of Next Round Capital, as saying that buyers had made it clear to his company that they had $2 billion in cash ready to deploy to Anthropic, even though the roughly $600 million in OpenAI stock that investors were trying to sell had not found takers.

Anderson sees something similar in Rainmaker. “The hardest stock to get in our market is Anthropic,” he told TechCrunch yesterday afternoon from his home in Miami. “There are no sellers.”

Anderson says part of what prompted this demand was the public showdown between Anthropic and the Department of Defense — a turn of events that initially seemed like bad news for the company but ended up being a boon.

“The app became more popular, and people rallied around the company as a sort of hero, taking on big government,” he said. “I think it enhanced the story and made it more distinct from OpenAI.”

This distinction has become increasingly important for investors navigating a market where for years the prevailing logic was to bet on everyone. Anderson notes that many institutional investors still want exposure to both Anthropic and OpenAI. “The jury is still out on which AI model will ultimately win out,” he said — but the momentum, at least in the secondary market, has shifted.

This doesn’t mean that OpenAI has fallen off a cliff. Anderson backs away slightly from a binary reading of the situation.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a two-party conversation,” he said.

But the excitement is not there. “It’s not as vibrant a market as Anthropics right now,” he admitted.

Regarding valuation, Anderson broadly confirmed a Bloomberg report that OpenAI shares on the secondary market are trading as if the company is worth $765 billion — a significant discount to the company’s latest seed round valuation of $852 billion. He cautioned that he was working from memory, but said Bloomberg’s number was “in the right range.”

OpenAI itself has tried to assert more control over secondary trading. “People should be very wary of any company claiming to have access to OpenAI shares, including through an SPV,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg, noting that the company has set up approved channels through banks, with no fees, to counter what it described as a high-fee intermediary model.

It may help that — at least for now — banks including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have begun offering OpenAI shares to their high-net-worth clients without charging a carry fee, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs charges its usual fees — often 15% to 20% of profits — to clients seeking exposure to humanity.

What none of this is is SpaceX, which stands out amid changing sentiment around these other powerful brands. Anderson describes it as one of the only names in the Rainmaker world that never saw the punitive correction that hit much of the private market between 2022 and 2024, a period in which many private companies’ stocks fell 60% to 70% from their peak (after their valuations had risen just as quickly).

The rocket and satellite giant “was always up and to the right,” Anderson said.

Anderson, who naturally has an economic interest in currying favor with the company and its former backers, credits SpaceX management with disciplined pricing and not extracting every last dollar from every financing round or tender offer.

“A lot of companies will fall into the temptation to maximize their share price each round,” he said. “The problem is that this leaves no room for error.”

SpaceX, by contrast, played conservatively, by “not getting too greedy,” and the gains for early investors were enormous. “You can imagine if someone in 2015 had the kind of gains they have now,” Anderson said.

To make a finer point for this comment: SpaceX was worth about $12 billion in 2015, when Google and Fidelity jointly invested $1 billion in the company. The person who got that price now gets a gain of more than 100x, with the company valued at more than $1 trillion ahead of the planned IPO.

This IPO now appears to be imminent. SpaceX this week secretly filed for an IPO, paving the way for what could be one of the largest market debuts in history, with Elon Musk reportedly aiming to raise between $50 billion and $75 billion, possibly in June. Only Saudi Aramco’s debut in 2019, which valued the energy giant at $1.7 trillion, came close.

Not surprisingly, the rumored filing has already changed the dynamics of the secondary market for SpaceX shares, according to Anderson.

“Today, I saw a stream of SpaceX investors coming to me and saying: ‘Can you give me SpaceX?'” he noted. “The buy side has been very active.” But the supply is drying up. The closer a company gets to going public, the less incentive current shareholders have to sell because they can see a liquidity event on the horizon.

This is where things get more complicated for OpenAI and Anthropic. The two companies are reportedly exploring their own public offerings and have indicated they may move this year. But SpaceX, by filing first, is about to test the market’s appetite in a big way, and Anderson noted that whoever follows will be at a disadvantage.

“SpaceX is going to absorb a lot of cash,” he said emphatically. “There’s only so much money allocated to IPOs.” The first mover reaches the bottom first; Those who follow them face more scrutiny, and perhaps less capital.

It’s a dynamic that’s happening in all so-called sectors and one that AI companies are not completely immune to, despite the attention it’s now getting. Time your IPO too early, and you’ll be the one testing the market’s receptivity. Wait for someone else to come first, and you may find that the biggest checks have already been written.

You can hear more of our interview with Anderson in the next episode of the StrictlyVC Download podcast, released every Tuesday. In the meantime, check out the latest episodes, including those featuring Whoop CEO Will Ahmed and investor Bill Gurley.