Lucy Guo never wrote a cheque to Anthropic, yet she ended up being a significant multi-million $ investor in the company.
The Scale AI co-founder recently told Fortune she’s a “pretty large shareholder” in Anthropic. And she’s previously teased on her Instagram stories that this is her best investment to date.
But it didn’t come from an angel cheque. Her fund, Backend Capital, had backed a small startup earlier on that Anthropic later acquired, and Anthropic paid in stock.
She calls it “the luckiest thing ever.”
The maths is pretty wild:
- Anthropic’s acquisitions from December 2025 to April 2026 happened at a valuation of roughly $350–380B
- Investors now expect the IPO to land at $2 trillion or more
- That’s roughly 4–5x on the Anthropic shares alone, on top of whatever she made from seed to exit
A hypothetical example of her investment: a 5% stake in a $400M stock deal is about $20M in Anthropic shares. At a $2T IPO, that’s close to $100M.
She calls this luck. But I think Lucy has been more than lucky a few times in her career at this point. There seems to be a pattern.
Photo: The Business Times. Source: Fortune.
