Good morning. Anthropic’s leadership has taken a significant step toward going public—and CFO Krishna Rao is leading the charge.
The maker of Claude AI confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed public listing. For Rao, who joined Anthropic in May 2024 after holding CFO roles at Fanatics Commerce and Cedar, the filing marks a major milestone in what has been a rapid rise at one of AI’s most valuable companies.
The move gives Anthropic, led by CEO Dario Amodei, the option to go public after the SEC completes its review, though the proposed initial public offering (IPO) will depend on market conditions and other factors. “The number of shares to be offered, and the price have not yet been set,” the company said in Monday’s announcement.
Wedbush Securities analysts wrote in a Monday industry note that the move “represents a major step for Anthropic to get ahead of OpenAI as Altman & Co. get ready to go through their own confidential filing.” Anthropic and OpenAI are both laying the groundwork for IPOs that could come as soon as late 2026.
On May 28, Anthropic announced it raised $65 billion in Series H funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, eclipsing competitor OpenAI’s value for the first time.
“This Series H financing also includes many of the world’s most prominent investors, as well as strategic infrastructure partners and hyperscalers,” Rao wrote in a LinkedIn post last week. The investment reflects the continued rapid growth in demand for Claude across enterprises and the people who use it for their everyday work, he said.
“We will utilize this capital to advance our safety and interpretability research, continue to expand our compute footprint, and scale the products and partnerships our customers rely on,” he noted.
Rao, who earned a degree in economics from Harvard and a law degree from Yale, didn’t take a traditional path to the CFO seat. But he did gain the operational and strategic experience that companies are increasingly seeking in finance chiefs.
Before his CFO roles, Rao led corporate and operations FP&A at Airbnb and later served as global head of corporate and business development, where he helped raise more than $10 billion in equity and debt capital, including the company’s IPO and private financings. Earlier in his career, he worked as a private equity investor at Blackstone.
FP&A is also increasingly becoming a career stop on the path to CFO because it builds the strategic business partnering skills boards now want. (Another example is Apple CFO Kevan Parekh, who came up through FP&A and corporate planning before becoming finance chief in January 2025.)
“Investors will be eagerly awaiting more details from Anthropic’s S-1 over the coming weeks,” according to Wedbush.
For Rao, the filing marks the beginning of what could be his most consequential act yet as a finance chief.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
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