亚洲投资者在IPO热潮中争相间接持有Anthropic股份Asian investors chase indirect access to Anthropic shares amid IPO fever

HONG KONG -- Wealthy Asian investors are piling into private funds that offer indirect exposure to sought-after shares of AI startups such as Anthropic and OpenAI, with some bankers saying that their clients are willing to offer premiums for such fund positions.

The scramble for access to tightly held private company shares comes as investors seek last-minute opportunities to ride the AI boom, despite scandals at Nvidia weighing on market sentiment and raising questions about the AI supply chain.

Anthropic shares are set to begin trading this Thursday in the largest initial public offering in history. Prices are set in a range of $70 to $78 per share and the company expects to raise $85 billion in net proceeds from the IPO.

Mostly shut out from direct ownership of major Silicon Valley unicorns, high-net-worth individuals and family offices in Asia have in the past turned to offshore funds and investment vehicles that give them indirect exposure. Rather than buying company shares directly, investors purchase interests in funds or special purpose vehicles that own the underlying stocks.

Since late-stage growth companies such as Anthropic "restrict direct access to the cap table," which means holding direct shares in the company, "first- or sometimes second-layer vehicles are often the only access route for investors," Geoffroy Troesch, head of private markets group Asia at Union Bancaire Privee, a Swiss private bank, told Nikkei Asia.

What the investors acquire through the funds, essentially, is "economic exposure through the fund in the shares," said Michael Wong, a private funds partner at Hogan Lovells Cadwalader.

Secondary transactions of shares in funds holding Anthropic shares either directly or indirectly have been on the rise in the past few months, according to private bankers and high-net-worth investors. One Hong Kong-based private banker said clients have been asking for ways to get into private funds with Anthropic and OpenAI shares, with some willing to pay a 30% premium for a slice from other investors.

Institutions are capitalizing on the opportunity to offload their positions to other wealthy investors, offering them an exposure through complex structures.

One fund that's currently raising capital from family offices in Asia and the Middle East said it allocates around 17% of its portfolio to Anthropic and 11% to OpenAI through secondary channels, emphasizing that direct access is either highly restricted or closed to most investors. It also has a stake in a fund managed by Mark Zuckerberg-backed Iconiq Capital, which is one of the early shareholders of Anthropic, according to fund materials seen by Nikkei Asia.

A person familiar with the fund and its managers said some of the investments were sourced from the personal portfolio of a wealthy investor who's seeking to exit some of their positions ahead of Anthropic's IPO.

The fund, domiciled in the Cayman Islands, said investors should expect to at least double their investments during the fund's life of up to eight years. It has an investment period of three years, much shorter than that for typical venture capital funds, which is over 10 years, indicating that its focus is sourcing secondary opportunities.

"Every layer that is created means the investor enters into a legal contract with the fund manager. All investors need to look at is whether they will get the economics in the end, because that's all they care about," Wong said.

Another Hong Kong-based investor, who holds shares in a U.S. fund with Anthropic exposure, said he is looking to sell part of his holdings to other individual investors to lock in gains, citing price uncertainty once the company goes public and a six-month lockup period. He is asking for a premium of over 20% to anyone buying his fund interests, betting that Anthropic's valuation would soar way above the $965 billion valuation he is selling at.

If SpaceX's IPO was any guide, investors should take caution on lofty IPO price tags: The rocket company tumbled as much as 30% below the listing price after it went public, as investors question its valuation and ballooning capex.

Anthropic's valuation has slid from an expected $2 trillion to around $1.4 trillion since the company filed for IPO at the end of October.

Apart from valuation risks, investors with indirect access to the AI company's stocks are ultimately subject to the fund managers they invest with.

Fund managers can "unilaterally commit to a longer lockup than the usual 180-day lockup period following the IPO," UBP's Troesch said, a situation that has happened to some SpaceX pre-IPO investors. "The structure of the private fund, and whether it is a first- or second-layer vehicle, has a significant impact on transparency and overall risk." In a June update, Anthropic warned investors of the risks of accessing the company's shares through indirect investment funds and said those funds most likely rely on mechanisms that circumvent the firm's transfer restrictions.

"Invest at your own risk: if someone offers you a way to participate, even on an indirect basis, in an investment in Anthropic, assume that it is invalid," the statement said.

A partner at a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that holds Anthropic shares directly said that it has been asking investors not to sell or transfer their holdings since the start of this year.

Before those restrictions were imposed, some of the fund's limited partners had sold their stakes with premiums of 100% to 200% through investment banks. "Prices are driven by supply and demand, rather than the underlying valuation," the partner said, adding that the fund generally advised its clients against selling their holdings before the IPO.

Retail investors who do not have the deep pockets or access to fund managers are also finding alternatives to getting Anthropic exposure.

Traders have built over $260 million in open interest in pre-IPO perpetual futures markets across platforms including Entropy, TradeXYZ and crypto exchange OKX, according to market data provider Talos. Perpetual futures have gained popularity this year amid the AI stock boom as a way to speculate on stock prices, sometimes with high leverage.

Exchange-traded funds that offer exposure to pre-IPO Anthropic shares have also gained traction. The funds usually have indirect access to the shares through holding special purpose vehicles (SPVs) that invest in Anthropic. The Tema Photonics & Optical ETF, managed by Tema ETFs, invests around 12.7% of its portfolio in Anthropic shares through an SPV.

"There is clearly demand from investors for access to these generationally transformative companies that are choosing to stay private longer. However, for most investors, options are limited or expensive. ETFs offer a low-cost, transparent and regulated way to gain this access," said Yuri Khodjamirian, chief investment officer at Tema ETFs.

For investors who have been waiting for this day, the moment feels historic. Alex Ma, principal at Alpha Omega Holdings, a single family office based in Singapore, said over the past two years his firm accumulated exposure to Anthropic shares through U.S. fund vehicles.

Ma believes it is important to have "the champion of the large language model and AI agent vertical" as part of the firm's portfolio allocation. "We choose to be on the right side of history," he said.