It’s hard to imagine now, but back in 2021 venture capitalists weren’t sold on Anthropic. The mega-AI startup is now valued at $380 billion, but at the time it had no public product, no revenue and was trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. “AI was not viewed as this supersexy, exciting thing that you would want to invest in,” says cofounder and president Daniela Amodei, who had been an early OpenAI employee before leaving with six of her colleagues to start Anthropic that year.

Her brother, CEO Dario Amodei, quickly drummed up $1.1 billion in funding from a range of billionaire investors, including Facebook alum Dustin Moskovitz and soon-to-be-disgraced crypto bro Sam Bankman-Fried. It was enough to cobble together an early version of Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, but not nearly enough to fully train it to compete against OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which exploded onto the scene in November 2022. Scared of spending billions backing what appeared to be an also-ran, most traditional VCs shied away—except Spark Capital partner Yasmin Razavi.

In May 2023, Razavi led a $450 million round for Anthropic that valued it at $5 billion. “It was the biggest check we had written in the history of our firm, so this wasn't one of these spray-and-pray moments where you get lucky,” says Razavi, speaking from her Soho apartment in New York City. She remembers writing two long investment memos, arguing her case to other Spark partners. “It was a big leap of faith, but this was the team that built GPT-3,” she says.

Now, Anthropic is in talks to raise at a $900 billion valuation, a number that would eclipse even OpenAI — with whispers of an IPO later this year.

Anthropic’s staggering success has for the first time catapulted Razavi, 37, onto our Midas List of the top 100 venture investors. The only Anthropic investor to have a board seat, she’s the highest-ranked........

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