Anthropic Stake Missed: German Investor Passed on €500,000 Ticket
Enrico Mellis of Animal Syndication Company turned down early Anthropic shares from the FTX estate. By his own math, €500,000 could now be worth about €167 million.
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giftdetect· the right gift in minutesGerman investor Enrico Mellis had the chance to buy into Anthropic early for a minimum ticket of €500,000, and he said no. By his own estimate, that decision may have cost him around €167 million.
Mellis, an investor at Animal Syndication Company, is the first subject of a new series called "Anti-Portfolio", which looks at startups investors could have backed but didn't. Anthropic, the company behind the AI chatbot Claude, was most recently valued at 965 billion dollars and counts among the most valuable startups in the world.
Secondaries from the FTX estate
According to Mellis, he and a few business angels looked at Anthropic secondaries at a valuation of, as he recalls, three billion dollars. The shares came from the holdings of the now-insolvent crypto company FTX, which were sold as part of its bankruptcy.
Several things put the group off. "The deck looked rather confusing, OpenAI was already valued extremely high at 8 to 10 billion, and then there was the whole FTX context," Mellis says. The combination struck them as "pretty sketchy". There was also a nagging question: if this was such a good deal, why was it landing on their desk? So they passed.
The math of a missed deal
Mellis ran the numbers himself. If Anthropic went public at a valuation of 2 trillion dollars, the €500,000 would have grown to roughly €167 million, assuming 50 percent dilution. Dilution means the shrinking of an existing stake when new shares are issued in later funding rounds. "A very, very expensive mistake," he says.
The lesson he draws is about separating two kinds of doubt: whether he truly doubts the company, or only the way the deal reached him. "A bad deck and an odd sales process can distract you quite a bit from what you actually have in front of you," Mellis says.
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