Scottish investor lines up Anthropic windfall months after SpaceX bonanza
Scottish investment shop Baillie Gifford is in line to more than triple its money on its stakes in Anthropic when the AI juggernaut floats on the stock market this summer, just months after netting a £3.6bn gain on its historic SpaceX punt.
Three of the Edinburgh-based asset manager’s flagship trusts could use Anthropic’s eagerly awaited public market debut to crystallise their investment in the Claude maker after a lock-up period preventing early backers from selling the shares expires.
Doing so would see them realise a gain worth three times their initial investment at IPO price, a City PM analysis showed, despite the fact all three funds only backed the artificial intelligence giant for the first time less than a year ago.
Anthropic is likely to become the second trillion-dollar public market debut in just a few months when it makes its long-awaited public market debut in New York later this summer. The tech juggernaut submitted confidential IPO paperwork to the US regulator earlier this month, paving the way for one of the largest listings in stock market history.
The firm – which was founded just five years ago and is run by enigmatic chief Dario Amodei – is expected to fetch a valuation between $965bn and $1 trillion when it floats in a few months. Last month, it it revealed its first quarter revenue was 80 times higher than the same time last year a blistering expansion that has it leapfrog OpenAI as the world’s largest specialist AI firm.
Baillie Gifford manages Schiehallion, US Growth Trust and Scottish Mortgage, all three of which have boasted stakes in Anthropic since Autumn 2025. Both Schiehallion and US Growth will get the opportunity to book a capital gain of more than five times their initial investment, while Scottish Mortgage, which has added to its stake at funding rounds since last autumn, is on course to double its initial investment, the analysis showed.
“Baillie Gifford has an impressive track record of identifying and securing access to some of the world’s most exciting companies,” James Carthew, head of investment company reserach at Quoteddata told City PM.
“It believes the best way to make money is to find world class companies and back them for the very long term. While it might take the opportunity of an IPO to trim an oversized position, it won’t sell just because a stock is now publicly traded.”
Any windfall would extend a historic hot streak for the Scottish investment firm, which is still basking in the multibillion-pound payday it booked from SpaceX’s record-breaking public market debut last week.
The investment house was an early backer of Elon Musk’s cosmic tech giant, and is on course to make roughly 30 times its initial should it chose to sell its stake when the shortened lock-up period concludes shortly after its first set of earnings next month.
Scottish Mortgage, the largest of Baillie Gifford’s four trusts with SpaceX holdings, has suggested it will hold onto its shares beyond the deadline, however.
The rocket maker has enjoyed a blistering start to life as a quoted company, rallying nearly 50 per cent in just two sessions of trading. The stock has proven particularly popular with retail investors whose interest has carried the firm, which also owns Starlink Elon Musk’s AI platform xAI, to become the fourth most valuable company in the world.
Baillie Gifford’s SpaceX and Anthropic bets have helped the manager to recover from a difficult period for several of its flagship trusts. Scottish Mortgage’s share price fell by more than 50 per cent between 2021 and 2023, but have since nearly doubled to make up all of that lost ground. US Growth Trust’s shares have followed a similar pattern.
Over that time it has forged a reputation for backing some of the world’s fastest-growing private companies in an investment trust structure, giving retail investors and wealth managers access to them before they float on a stock exchange.