The investment, which began in early 2023 when backing an AI research lab was “not obvious,” now represents roughly two-thirds of Salesforce’s entire strategic portfolio
Salesforce’s stake in Anthropic is now worth approximately $5 billion after investing since early 2023, representing roughly two-thirds of its entire strategic portfolio. The return comes as Anthropic files confidentially for an IPO at a $965 billion valuation.TL;DR
Salesforce has a stake in Anthropic worth approximately $5 billion after investing repeatedly in the Claude developer since early 2023, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The software company first participated in Anthropic’s fundraising with roughly $50 million and has continued investing in every subsequent round. With Anthropic’s confidential IPO filing also landing on Monday, Salesforce is positioned to realise one of the largest venture-style returns in enterprise software history.
The scale of the return becomes clearer in portfolio context. Salesforce’s total strategic investments across hundreds of companies were valued at $7.8 billion at the end of April, according to SEC filings. That figure predates Anthropic’s latest $65 billion funding round, which valued the company at $965 billion and more than doubled its previous valuation. After the revaluation, the Anthropic stake alone represents roughly two-thirds of Salesforce’s entire strategic investment portfolio.
Salesforce Ventures acknowledged in a February blog post that the initial investment was not a consensus trade. “In 2023, betting on a research-heavy startup at a meaningful valuation was not obvious, given there was no market precedent of AI research turning into commercial success,” the firm wrote. Anthropic’s models now power AI features across Salesforce’s product suite, including Slack, and CEO Marc Benioff has said Salesforce will spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens in 2026.
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The investment structure gives Salesforce a double exposure. It is both an investor capturing Anthropic’s valuation gains and a customer embedding Anthropic’s models into its own products, including the Agentforce AI agent platform that reached $1.2 billion in annual recurring revenue last quarter. As enterprise AI spending shifts toward agentic platforms, Salesforce benefits regardless of whether its own AI products or Anthropic’s underlying models capture more of the value.
Salesforce is not the only company reaping outsized returns from early Anthropic bets. Zoom invested approximately $51 million in Anthropic’s Series C in May 2023 through its Zoom Ventures arm. That stake is now worth approximately $1.3 billion, a roughly 25x return in three years. Accel, which invested in Anthropic’s Series G, has seen its stake more than quadruple in months as the company’s valuation surged past OpenAI’s.
The returns reflect a dynamic that has become defining in the current AI cycle: a small number of model providers, primarily Anthropic and OpenAI, are capturing an extraordinary share of both venture capital and unrealised gains. For Salesforce, the $5 billion Anthropic stake has appreciated more than the combined market capitalisation gains of many of its software acquisitions.
The $5 billion valuation is on paper until Anthropic’s IPO provides a public market price. Anthropic’s ongoing legal dispute with the Pentagon, which designated the company a supply-chain risk after it refused to grant the military unrestricted model access, represents a material overhang. Anthropic has said the designation could jeopardise billions in revenue.
For Salesforce specifically, the concentration of its strategic portfolio in a single company creates exposure that investors will scrutinise. If Anthropic’s IPO prices below the $965 billion private valuation, or if the stock declines post-listing, the mark-to-market impact on Salesforce’s balance sheet would be significant. Salesforce itself announced the acquisition of Contentful on the same day, continuing a heavy spending pace that has kept its own stock under pressure for months.
But the strategic logic of the original bet has been validated. Salesforce invested in Anthropic before the market had consensus that AI research labs could become commercial businesses. Three years later, Anthropic is filing for a public listing at a valuation approaching $1 trillion, and the $50 million that started the relationship has grown roughly 100-fold.
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