Investing Superstar Yasmin Razavi Turned A $75 Million Check Into A $3 Billion AI Windfall

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Today on Forbes, investing superstar Yasmin Razavi turned a $75 million check into a $3 billion AI windfall.

[00:00:11]It's hard to imagine now, but back in 2021, venture capitalists weren't sold on Anthropic.

[00:00:18]The mega AI startup has been valued at $380 billion as of earlier this year.

[00:00:23]But last Thursday, announced it had raised $65 billion in series H funding, [music] valuing the company at $965 billion.

[00:00:33]But at the time back in 2021, it had no public product, no revenue, and was trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars.

[00:00:41]Co-founder and president Daniela Amodei, who had been an early OpenAI employee before leaving with six of her colleagues to start Anthropic that year, says, quote, "AI was not viewed as this super sexy, exciting thing that you would want to invest in."

[00:00:57]Her brother, CEO Dario Amodei, quickly drummed up $1.1 billion in funding from a range of billionaire investors, including Facebook alum Dustin Moskovitz and soon-to-be disgraced crypto bro Sam Bankman-Fried.

[00:01:11]It was enough to cobble together an early version of Claude, Anthropic's AI chatbot, but not nearly enough to fully train it to compete against OpenAI's ChatGPT, which exploded onto the scene in November 2022.

[00:01:25]Scared of spending billions backing what appeared to be an also-ran, most traditional VCs shied away.

[00:01:31]Except Spark Capital partner Yasmin Razavi.

[00:01:36]In May 2023, Razavi led a $450 million round for Anthropic that valued it at $5 billion.

[00:01:44]Razavi, speaking from her Soho apartment in New York City, says, quote, "It was the biggest check we had written in the history of our firm. So this wasn't one of these spray and pray moments where you get lucky."

[00:01:56]She remembers writing two long investment memos arguing her case to other Spark partners.

[00:02:01]She says, quote, "It was a big leap of faith, but this was the team that built GPT-3."

[00:02:08]Now, Anthropic sits at an almost trillion-dollar valuation, a number that eclipses OpenAI with whispers of an IPO later this year.

[00:02:18]Anthropic's staggering success has for the first time catapulted Razavi, who's 37 years old, onto our Midas list of the top 100 venture investors, which we released last week.

[00:02:30]The only Anthropic investor to have a board seat, she's the highest-ranked newcomer on this year's list at number 13.

[00:02:37]Spark's initial $75 million check and follow-on investments to Amodei's company is now worth at least $3 billion, and that figure was based on the earlier $380 billion valuation.

[00:02:50]It could be worth more than double that now.

[00:02:53]Altimeter Capital investor Paul Meen Yang, whose fund has also backed OpenAI and Anthropic, wrote, quote, "This will go down as one of the best investments of this generation."

[00:03:05]Now in its 25th year, the 2026 Midas list represents a snapshot of an industry on the cusp of its largest returns in decades.

[00:03:14]Investors in just three private companies, Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, are heavily represented.

[00:03:21]If all three were to go public at current valuations, they would bring in an estimated $815 billion in profit, more than every other VC deal of the last decade combined.

[00:03:33]Anthropic in particular has been on a tear.

[00:03:35]The launch of a code-writing tool with near-human abilities just over a year ago has hit the tech industry like an atomic bomb.

[00:03:43]Daniela Amodei says behind [music] the scenes Razavi had encouraged the co-founders to focus on programming.

[00:03:50]Amodei says, quote, "Yasmin pushed us a lot to think about coding as its own vertical. We had the outlines of what Claude code would be one day, but she was like, this is going to be a huge market and you can absolutely own."

[00:04:03]She was right. By April this year, Anthropic was reporting that Claude code alone made $2.5 billion in run rate revenue.

[00:04:12]It is so good that investors are scrambling to figure out which software companies are soon to be obsolete.

[00:04:18]Claude code spawned Claude co-work, an AI agent tool that can handle white-collar work like making presentations, sifting data, and creating spreadsheets, which in February caused a $285 billion software sell-off.

[00:04:32]And the company's new model Mythos found scores of hackable backdoors scattered across the internet, which have now been patched.

[00:04:40]Dario Amodei now says that the business grew 80-fold in the first quarter alone.

[00:04:46]Forbes reported last year the company made $4.5 billion in hard revenue.

[00:04:51]That growth has required masses of compute and capital.

[00:04:54]Comparatively, Sparks checks are small fry compared to the $3 billion from Google and $13 billion from Amazon, respectively.

[00:05:03]But its return multiple will be far greater, more than doubling the $1.4 billion fund that Rezavi wrote the first check from.

[00:05:12]For full coverage and to see the whole Midas list, check out Ian Martin's piece on forbes.com.

[00:05:20]This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.

[00:05:22]Thanks for tuning in.