In private markets, especially with the recent trend of selling a tiny portion of the company at a massive price, the valuation represents something much closer to the maximum that any investor in the world thinks the company is valued at.
In private markets, especially with the recent trend of selling a tiny portion of the company at a massive price, the valuation represents something much closer to the maximum that any investor in the world thinks the company is valued at.
Amazon can "buy" $2B worth of Anthropic to guarantee $2B of spending on AWS - to report that as growth under AWS in their earnings - to juice their stock price.
They also get to report that their investment in the previous round is up massively.
This is all before accounting for the preference stack, which makes multiplying a Series F per-share price (itself derived from dividing compute time by some magic number) by employee common stock a bit silly.
That’s still something, especially right at the money!
Some series also have various blocking, dividend and other rights.