UK retail investors are set to be offered the chance to buy shares in Anthropic’s hotly awaited IPO after tech stocks were sent reeling by the US midterm elections. Fintech platform Retail Book has been appointed to co-ordinate an “expected” UK retail offer for the Claude creator, according to a notice on the chatbot’s website, amid a rocky week on Wall Street.
The Democratic Party’s victory in taking control of both the House and the Senate caused AI-related stocks to plunge on Thursday before partially recovering on Friday. Investment sites Hargreaves Lansdown, AJ Bell, e Toro, Interactive Brokers, Interactive Investor and Revolut are lined up to take orders from their clients.
The move comes five months after more than 100,000 individual UK investors applied for almost $1bn of stock in Space X’s record-breaking initial public offering, in the first use of a new public offer platform introduced by the Financial Conduct Authority in January. Anthropic’s impending float may be even bigger than Space X’s, with talk of it raising as much as $100bn, compared with Space X’s $86bn, although it may have a lower valuation, at $1.5tn-$1.6tn, versus $1.77tn.
Jason Hollands, managing director of Evelyn Partners, warned that Anthropic is “a very risky stock,” adding that at the time of its IPO, Space X was on an enormous valuation without the revenues to back it up.
Leveraged Shares plans to list a 3x Long Anthropic exchange-traded product (ETP) on the London Stock Exchange ahead of the IPO, with the vehicle holding cash until Anthropic actually floats.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing