Spark Capital Partner Yasmin Razavi Led $450 Million Anthropic Investment in 2023

Spark Capital partner Yasmin Razavi led a $450 million investment round for Anthropic in May 2023 that valued the AI company at $5 billion. At the time, most traditional venture firms declined to participate because Anthropic had no public product and no revenue. Razavi wrote two investment memos to persuade other Spark partners to back the round.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei after they left OpenAI. The company raised $1.1 billion from individual investors including Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Bankman-Fried. Those funds supported early development of the Claude chatbot but were insufficient to train models at the scale needed to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT, which launched publicly in November 2022.

Anthropic is now in talks to raise capital at a $900 billion valuation. The company reported $4.5 billion in revenue last year and projects a $30 billion annualized run rate for 2026. Razavi's initial $75 million check plus follow-on investments is now valued at least $3 billion.

She is the only Anthropic investor with a board seat and ranks No. 13 on the 2026 Midas List as its highest-ranked newcomer.

Razavi was born in Tehran and moved to Canada as a teenager. She studied industrial engineering at the University of Toronto, worked at Index Ventures and McKinsey, and joined Spark Capital after attending Harvard Business School. She previously led Spark's investments in Marqeta in 2019 and Deel in 2020. She has since backed Crusoe, valued at $10 billion, and AI chip maker MatX.