Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Finn Gomez/Getty Images

Katie here. The Anthropic S-1 is here, and it confirms what VCs have been whispering for months: this is a company moving at warp speed. Just over three years after its first major VC round, Anthropic is poised to break IPO records and deliver historic wins to its earliest backers.

What stood out to me was how incredibly fast Anthropic has scaled. Spark Capital was the first firm to lead a round into the AI giant in spring 2023 — just three and a half years ago. They own more than 1% of the company, an investment that could be worth tens of billions of dollars in short order.

It was just months ago that SpaceX set the record for the largest ever IPO , but that timeline was remarkably different: the first venture capitalists invested in 2002!

"There's no company that's gone from zero to where they are today in this period of time," said Byron Deeter, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners.…