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As Anthropic prepares for what could be one of the biggest IPOs on record, Wall Street is looking further into the future than it commonly does to put a price on \u200bthe AI company, valuing it based on how much revenue it could generate two years from now.<\/strong><\/p>\n Anthropic is projecting 2028 revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, according to \u200ctwo people familiar with the company\u2019s financials, a figure that has not previously been reported. The projection dwarfs the $47 billion revenue \u201crun rate,\u201d reflecting the firm\u2019s current pace of business, that the company publicized as recently as May, and shows the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite.<\/span><\/p>\n Bankers and investors are using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on forecasts, four sources said.<\/span><\/p>\n Using revenue multiples is common for high-growth software companies that have yet to establish a mature profit profile.<\/span><\/p>\n But looking \u200btwo years ahead is less typical, reflecting the speed at which Anthropic\u2019s business is expanding and the challenges of setting benchmarks for a company still spending heavily to build out its \u200bAI infrastructure, the people said.<\/span><\/p>\n The pace of spending on AI investment has been responsible for pullbacks in many of the most popular tech stocks in \u2060recent months, including some of the firms viewed as comparable to Anthropic.<\/span><\/p>\n There have been precedents among some of the fastest-growing companies that hit the market recently. Backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue expectations in \u200bthe runup to the firm\u2019s IPO this year, and SpaceX projections extended as far as 2029 before the company went public at a record valuation in June, the people said.<\/span><\/p>\n The approach reflects the difficulty of valuing \u200ban AI company whose margins are still being pressured by enormous 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/span><\/p>\n Cloud infrastructure company Cloudflare, enterprise software company Palantir and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX are among the public companies being considered as reference points for Anthropic\u2019s valuation ahead of \u200bthe company\u2019s analyst day, the people said.<\/span><\/p>\n Public-market comparables are a crucial part of the IPO valuation process, giving investors a benchmark for how companies seen as having similar growth profiles and business models \u200bare valued. The peer group can also help determine which revenue or earnings multiples should be applied to a company\u2019s financial forecasts.<\/span><\/p>\n Palantir is valued at 53 times this year\u2019s expected revenue, making it one of Wall Street\u2019s priciest \u200cstocks. SpaceX \u2060and Cloudflare both trade at 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, LSEG data show.<\/span><\/p>\n Each of the companies offers a different lens on Anthropic. Palantir has become a reference point for investors valuing businesses with rapid growth and exposure to AI. Cloudflare provides a comparison with a high-growth software and infrastructure company, while SpaceX offers an example of a company valued in part on expectations for its future scale rather than its current financial profile.<\/span><\/p>\n Established companies are typically valued more heavily on earnings, or EBITDA, which gives investors a sense of the economics of the business.<\/span><\/p>\n For Anthropic, however, current EBITDA does not fully capture \u200bthe economics investors expect the company to achieve \u200bat scale. Anthropic is spending enormous amounts on \u2060GPUs and other computing capacity, model training, inference and hiring. Those expenses are necessary to support its rapid expansion but could become a smaller percentage of revenue as the business grows.<\/span><\/p>\n The company\u2019s financial trajectory already shows how quickly that equation is changing. Anthropic\u2019s revenue run rate was about $9 billion at the end \u200bof 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 \u200bsecond quarter of 2026, more \u2060than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.<\/span><\/p>\nSEARCHING FOR COMPS<\/span><\/h2>\n
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