Iconiq, Wealth Adviser for Tech Billionaires, Pours Billions Into AI Startups Like Anthropic

Iconiq, Go-To Wealth Adviser for Tech's Elite, Is Putting Billions Into AI

Last year, Anthropic PBC chief Dario Amodei and a handful of executives traveled 8,000 miles from San Francisco to the Middle East. They were there to meet with some of the world's most deep-pocketed investors, including Qatar's sovereign wealth fund and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. Photos of Amodei and wealth fund officials including Ibrahim Ajami, head of ventures at Mubadala Capital, were widely circulated online. Missing from the headlines was the trip's organizer: Iconiq, a financial firm that has managed the personal fortunes of senior figures in Middle Eastern and Asian governments for more than a decade, as well as those of tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella. Historically a behind-the-scenes operator, Iconiq has grown into a behemoth with $100 billion in assets under management, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg and a person familiar with the matter. Its clients have included global royal families, billionaires and A-list stars like Tom Cruise and Pharrell Williams, the people said, relationships that haven't been previously reported. Recently, Nvidia Corp.'s Jensen Huang, the world's eighth-richest person, has also signed on as a client, said one of the people with knowledge of the situation, asking not to be identified discussing private information. Iconiq, which is famously secretive, repeatedly declined to comment on its client list. Now, Iconiq is further branching out from the relatively staid world of money management, and expanding its reach into venture capital -- making big bets on companies like Anthropic, pioneering a new style of investing and becoming a multibillion-dollar force in tech's artificial intelligence frenzy. Iconiq put more than $3 billion into AI startups in 2025 alone, on par with the investment tallies of some of Silicon Valley's best-known VC firms. Up next, San Francisco-based Iconiq is upping the stakes for its venture arm, with plans to raise billions for a new fund, according to a securities filing and people familiar with the matter. That would add to its $26 billion under management specifically for VC investing, making it one of the country's biggest startup investors. Some of Iconiq's early VC bets have already paid off. The firm's first four funds, all launched before 2020, rank among the top 25% of their peer groups as of the end of last year, based on the most recently available Cambridge Associates benchmarks. For example, Iconiq's first fund, a $509 million vehicle launched in 2013, returned investors 2.6 times their money, according to a person familiar with the figures. Its second fund, at $1.02 billion, brought investors 4.2 times their money as of the end of last year, performing in the top 5% of its peer group from that year. But those funds look small compared with the firm's current ambitions. Iconiq raised $5.75 billion for its last VC fund, and has invested about $4 billion in Anthropic, a large language model maker barreling toward an initial public offering. Iconiq, despite only backing the company for the first time last year, is one of the largest investors in the startup, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The firm declined to comment on its stake, fundraising plans or performance. Iconiq is unfazed by industry worries that AI companies could be overvalued, instead focusing on the technology's potential to remake swaths of the existing economy. "It's been all AI, all the time," Iconiq partner Matthew Jacobson said in an interview. "The creative destruction creates a tremendous amount of opportunity." Balling With Beckham Investor Divesh Makan, 52, is the driving personality behind Iconiq. Born in South Africa, Makan attended Michaelhouse, an elite all-boys boarding school in KwaZulu-Natal that refers to its alumni as the "Old Boys' Club." In media appearances, Makan is exuberant but polished, likening his role to that of a golf caddy -- helpful, humble and out of the spotlight. Makan made an early name for himself as a financial adviser for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, where he met Facebook co-founder Zuckerberg. When Makan co-founded Iconiq in 2011, Zuckerberg was one of his earliest clients -- and proved to be an extremely influential one. Iconiq soon attracted other executives in that orbit, including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, former Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, and Reid Hoffman, the investor best known as the co-founder of LinkedIn. The idea behind the new firm -- whose founders also include Michael Anders and Chad Boeding -- was to create a wealth management outfit built on long-term relationships, Makan has said. They wanted to build a group that could help with virtually anything -- think, arranging private jets to evacuate a client from a snowed-in ski resort, or setting up exclusive real estate purchases. Today, employees at Iconiq are still pushed to provide their clients with memorable moments, and to maintain absolute discretion. The firm has previously fired people for leaking information. When this reporter arrived at Iconiq's San Francisco office for a 50-minute meeting, staff were notified that a journalist was in the building and advised on enhanced security protocol. While Bloomberg spoke to more than two dozen investors, clients and people familiar with the firm for this article, Makan declined to be interviewed. Iconiq is exclusive about who it lets in as a wealth management client. For example, it determined musician Kanye West was a public relations risk, according to a 2021 report, before his most eye-catching scandals. "We end up being fairly targeted in who we invite because this business is not scalable," Makan told Bloomberg in a 2024 interview. The firm generally includes clients with $25 million in net worth, per its filings. In practice, its median client has about $1 billion in assets, Makan said in 2024. For the people it does work with, Iconiq aims to provide "spine-tingling" service, said London partner Seth Pierrepont. "We sort of operate on this mantra of giving twice before asking once." That could mean organizing exclusive events, like a soccer scrimmage with David Beckham for a client and his family, or hosting a private movie screening for a new Mission: Impossible film attended by Tom Cruise himself. The firm is also able to offer key connections to important people. It's not unheard of for Iconiq to make more than 100 introductions to potential customers for a startup, even before investing. In the case of AI company ElevenLabs, Chief Executive Officer Mati Staniszewski met Cruise at an Iconiq event and discussed using the startup's AI translation tools to make the star's films in multiple languages, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation. Iconiq also hosted Staniszewski as its guest at the Grammy Awards and helped his startup operate a pop-up demonstration at a star-studded afterparty. At the event, Staniszewski said artists could use ElevenLabs' AI music generator to create an original track and then blast out the song to the entire party. "For us, that space is so important, just to show the art of the possible," he said. Part of the firm's mandate is to make "goosebump-inducing introductions that others can't," Pierrepont said, "just given, you know, the unique folks that are in this community." A VC Firm Is Born Iconiq's prized community is also driving its growing VC ambitions. The firm first raised money for a venture capital fund in 2013, spurred partly by the desire to bring up-and-coming entrepreneurs into its network, said Will Griffith, founding partner of Iconiq's VC arm. Another reason to invest in startups was that Iconiq's existing network could surface "interesting investment opportunities," said Anders, an Iconiq co-founder, in an interview with Bloomberg last year. Many of Iconiq's wealth management clients are also investors in its VC funds. The creation of the new unit was spearheaded by Makan and Griffith. At the time, Iconiq had ties to companies like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. But the firm decided not to focus on then-hot consumer-facing businesses. It instead chased investments in software as a service, or SaaS. "Everyone, at that point in time, was focused on consumer," Griffith said. "We made a very big decision from inception to go after SaaS, which was much less well understood." The result was key bets on companies like Snowflake Inc. and Datadog Inc., both of which are now publicly traded. Iconiq's third venture capital fund, a $1.33 billion effort launched in 2016, returned a formidable 4.7 times investors' money as of the end of last year, driven by profitable bets on companies like Snowflake, GitLab Inc. and Procore Technologies Inc., according to a person familiar with the matter. Those deals helped vault the vehicle into the top 5% of funds launched that year, according to Cambridge Associates benchmarks. The person familiar with the numbers asked not to be identified because VC returns are almost never made public and are generally considered to be a closely guarded secret. Performance data for Iconiq's three most recent funds, which include the vast majority of its AI deals, could not be learned. But some signs point to good news for limited partners, at least on paper. When Iconiq first invested in ElevenLabs, the company was valued at about $3 billion; that's jumped to $11 billion. Iconiq also invested in a competitive financing for Sierra, a customer service upstart led by former Salesforce Inc. co-CEO Bret Taylor last valued at $10 billion. And the firm has seen its stake in Legora, a legal AI startup, spike in value since its initial investment last year. Today, some 100 of the firm's 550 employees work in its venture practice -- a total that comes out to a little under one employee per portfolio company. Picking relatively few startups to bet on, the firm is almost always the lead investor in the deals it does work on. "Our ambition is to become a primary capital partner to these companies," investing in multiple rounds, Pierrepont said. "It's one of the reasons why our portfolio is so concentrated -- it's so that we make sure we have enough resources to devote to those relationships to earn that right over time." Going forward, the firm is expanding the types of VC bets it typically does. That includes moving beyond software into capital-intensive sectors like robotics. It's also doing more investing in earlier, less proven startups. In the last seven years, about half of its investments went to early-stage companies generating less than $10 million in recurring revenue. (One of the firm's first bets was in Figma's seed round, Griffith said.) Iconiq also expects to keep increasing the investments it makes in young companies. And recently, the firm did its first-ever incubation, backing a startup launched by one of its partners. "It's never too early for an entrepreneur to meet Iconiq," said partner Murali Joshi. Funding rounds for top companies "move super swiftly," so by the time a startup's team is actively fundraising, "if you're meeting them for the very first time, you're behind." The expansive VC bets aren't without controversy. The most obvious criticism of a firm like Iconiq is that as its venture capital operation grows, it presents conflicts of interest with its core business of managing money. One of its securities filings mentions the term "conflict of interest" 21 times, noting that as Iconiq works with some of tech's most powerful people and companies, their motivations might be at odds with one another or potentially with the firm itself. In a VC context, that could mean recommending its own funds over external investment opportunities, or advising startups and clients that compete. In 2018, Iconiq co-founder Boeding left to launch a competitor. When that firm made its debut, it specifically promised not to peddle its own venture or private equity funds to wealth clients. Iconiq said it assiduously manages any conflicts. Despite the overlap in financial interests, Jacobson said Iconiq's VC and wealth teams operate with strict confidentiality. "If a portfolio company that's competing with one of our client's companies shares information, that information never travels across that boundary," he said. "We've had situations where clients have wanted to acquire portfolio companies that we didn't want to sell." The Anthropic Gamble Last year's Middle East tour for Anthropic executives, one of a string of international trips the company has made, came at a vital time for the startup. Amodei had been skeptical of working with countries in the Gulf, lamenting the possibility of enriching "dictators," but he eventually relented. "Unfortunately, I think 'no bad person should ever benefit from our success' is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on," he wrote in a memo over the summer, acknowledging Anthropic had to tap into larger sources of capital to meet his company's immense spending needs. Luckily, Iconiq has deep relationships in the region. Anthropic and Iconiq declined to comment on the trip. The startup was not actively fundraising at the time, according to people familiar with the matter, and the meetings were part of an effort to build relationships in the region, some of which were preexisting. Anthropic isn't the only company Iconiq has made global introductions for. ElevenLabs' Staniszewski also made a similar trip across the Middle East, meeting a mix of customers and investors. "We weren't in fundraising mode, so the expectation was very clear that we are first and foremost coming from the commercial side," he said. "And that funding might be something we are interested in in the medium term as well." In February, Anthropic announced a new funding round that effectively doubled its valuation to $380 billion -- a deal co-led by several investors, including Iconiq and MGX. Qatar Investment Authority also participated in the round. Iconiq has bet billions of dollars and much of its VC reputation on Anthropic's success. A majority of the firm's $5.2 billion in AI investments to date has gone into the startup. Makan has also joined the board as an observer, Anthropic said, making him a key player at the fast-growing company. Still, for Iconiq, there are risks to investing so much energy and capital into a single startup, particularly in such a volatile industry. Last month, Anthropic was labeled a supply chain risk by the Pentagon, the result of a spectacular blowup over AI safeguards. The startup went on to tell a judge that it could lose billions of dollars in revenue this year after the supply-risk designation. Like other AI rivals, Anthropic is also burning vast amounts of cash to build and hone its models. Iconiq first met with Anthropic in 2023. It didn't invest at the time, when the company was relatively small. Instead, it reentered the picture in 2025, leading the company's Series F funding round at a $183 billion valuation. While the deal was a little late, and hazards remain, the investment could pay off in spades for the firm. Iconiq owns less than 2% of the startup, according to Bloomberg's estimates. That stake would be worth in the ballpark of $7 billion at the company's current valuation, which could rise substantially if it goes public this year, netting Iconiq huge returns. This month, some investors have approached Anthropic asking it to take their money at a valuation of about $800 billion or higher, which would make it one of the most valuable startups in the world. Krishna Rao, Anthropic's chief financial officer, said it was important for the company to work with a firm that has a global network. In addition to raising money from the Middle East, Anthropic has also brought in capital from GIC and Temasek, Singaporean state investment firms. "The benefits of AI are not specific to one country or one region," Rao said. "So we've really diversified our investor base -- and Iconiq has helped us do that." Rao added: "They're very, very focused on global and international relationships, which we saw as extremely valuable." Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Plus Signed UpPlus Sign UpPlus Sign Up By continuing, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. There are also other, less tangible benefits to having a close relationship with Anthropic. Max Junestrand -- CEO of Legora, another Iconiq portfolio company -- said that the connections were helpful for his startup. "The fact that they're big investors in Anthropic, and we work closely with them and many of the other AI labs too, has been fantastic," Junestrand said. "Iconiq has certainly been able to help us navigate that organization and get us preferential treatment." Iconiq tends to pick a few winners, rather than backing a range of companies in one industry. Junestrand said that strategy was important when it came to trusting the firm not to back a competitor in legal AI. "It's a foundational thing, and if that weren't there, then I wouldn't be speaking to them," he said. However, the scale of the AI boom has meant that the firm has invested in rivals. In addition to backing Anthropic, Iconiq also has a stake in OpenAI. It has put more than $150 million into the company, via direct investment and through an earlier bet on the startup Statsig, which OpenAI acquired. Jacobson declined to comment on the firm's stakes, but said of OpenAI and Anthropic: "I don't think their success comes at the cost of each other." Industry fears of a bubble aside, Jacobson believes that the AI boom is still a good investment -- and that the particular needs of AI companies, and the limited pool of people who can help, plays to Iconiq's strengths. "If you're a large-scale AI company, you need to get to know some of the deepest pools of capital, the heads of state, the biggest players," Jacobson said. "A partner like Iconiq can facilitate those discussions probably better than anyone else in the world."

Iconiq, go-to wealth adviser for tech's elite, is putting billions into AI

Iconiq is expanding aggressively into venture capital, investing billions in AI startups like Anthropic. Leveraging elite global networks, it connects founders with powerful investors, achieving strong returns while navigating risks, conflicts of interest, and growing ambitions in tech. Last year, Anthropic PBC chief Dario Amodei and a handful of executives traveled 8,000 miles from San Francisco to the Middle East. They were there to meet with some of the world's most deep-pocketed investors, including Qatar's sovereign wealth fund and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. Photos of Amodei and wealth fund officials including Ibrahim Ajami, head of ventures at Mubadala Capital, were widely circulated online. Missing from the headlines was the trip's organizer: Iconiq, a financial firm that has managed the personal fortunes of senior figures in Middle Eastern and Asian governments for more than a decade, as well as those of tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella. Historically a behind-the-scenes operator, Iconiq has grown into a behemoth with $100 billion in assets under management, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg and a person familiar with the matter. Its clients have included global royal families, billionaires and A-list stars like Tom Cruise and Pharrell Williams, the people said, relationships that haven't been previously reported. Recently, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, the world's eighth-richest person, has also signed on as a client, said one of the people with knowledge of the situation, asking not to be identified discussing private information. Iconiq, which is famously secretive, repeatedly declined to comment on its client list. Now, Iconiq is further branching out from the relatively staid world of money management, and expanding its reach into venture capital -- making big bets on companies like Anthropic, pioneering a new style of investing and becoming a multibillion-dollar force in tech's artificial intelligence frenzy. Iconiq put more than $3 billion into AI startups in 2025 alone, on par with the investment tallies of some of Silicon Valley's best-known VC firms. Up next, San Francisco-based Iconiq is upping the stakes for its venture arm, with plans to raise billions for a new fund, according to a securities filing and people familiar with the matter. That would add to its $26 billion under management specifically for VC investing, making it one of the country's biggest startup investors. Some of Iconiq's early VC bets have already paid off. The firm's first four funds, all launched before 2020, rank among the top 25% of their peer groups as of the end of last year, based on the most recently available Cambridge Associates benchmarks. For example, Iconiq's first fund, a $509 million vehicle launched in 2013, returned investors 2.6 times their money, according to a person familiar with the figures. Its second fund, at $1.02 billion, brought investors 4.2 times their money as of the end of last year, performing in the top 5% of its peer group from that year. But those funds look small compared with the firm's current ambitions. Iconiq raised $5.75 billion for its last VC fund, and has invested about $4 billion in Anthropic, a large language model maker barreling toward an initial public offering. Iconiq, despite only backing the company for the first time last year, is one of the largest investors in the startup, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The firm declined to comment on its stake, fundraising plans or performance. Iconiq is unfazed by industry worries that AI companies could be overvalued, instead focusing on the technology's potential to remake swaths of the existing economy. "It's been all AI, all the time," Iconiq partner Matthew Jacobson said in an interview. "The creative destruction creates a tremendous amount of opportunity." Balling with Beckham Investor Divesh Makan, 52, is the driving personality behind Iconiq. Born in South Africa, Makan attended Michaelhouse, an elite all-boys boarding school in KwaZulu-Natal that refers to its alumni as the "Old Boys' Club." In media appearances, Makan is exuberant but polished, likening his role to that of a golf caddy -- helpful, humble and out of the spotlight. Makan made an early name for himself as a financial adviser for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, where he met Facebook cofounder Zuckerberg. When Makan co-founded Iconiq in 2011, Zuckerberg was one of his earliest clients -- and proved to be an extremely influential one. Iconiq soon attracted other executives in that orbit, including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, former Meta Platforms chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, and Reid Hoffman, the investor best known as the cofounder of LinkedIn. The idea behind the new firm -- whose founders also include Michael Anders and Chad Boeding -- was to create a wealth management outfit built on long-term relationships, Makan has said. They wanted to build a group that could help with virtually anything -- think, arranging private jets to evacuate a client from a snowed-in ski resort, or setting up exclusive real estate purchases. Today, employees at Iconiq are still pushed to provide their clients with memorable moments, and to maintain absolute discretion. The firm has previously fired people for leaking information. When this reporter arrived at Iconiq's San Francisco office for a 50-minute meeting, staff were notified that a journalist was in the building and advised on enhanced security protocol. While Bloomberg spoke to more than two dozen investors, clients and people familiar with the firm for this article, Makan declined to be interviewed. Iconiq is exclusive about who it lets in as a wealth management client. For example, it determined musician Kanye West was a public relations risk, according to a 2021 report, before his most eye-catching scandals. "We end up being fairly targeted in who we invite because this business is not scalable," Makan told Bloomberg in a 2024 interview. The firm generally includes clients with $25 million in net worth, per its filings. In practice, its median client has about $1 billion in assets, Makan said in 2024. For the people it does work with, Iconiq aims to provide "spine-tingling" service, said London partner Seth Pierrepont. "We sort of operate on this mantra of giving twice before asking once." That could mean organizing exclusive events, like a soccer scrimmage with David Beckham for a client and his family, or hosting a private movie screening for a new Mission: Impossible film attended by Tom Cruise himself. The firm is also able to offer key connections to important people. It's not unheard of for Iconiq to make more than 100 introductions to potential customers for a startup, even before investing. In the case of AI company ElevenLabs, chief executive officer Mati Staniszewski met Cruise at an Iconiq event and discussed using the startup's AI translation tools to make the star's films in multiple languages, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation. Iconiq also hosted Staniszewski as its guest at the Grammy Awards and helped his startup operate a pop-up demonstration at a star-studded afterparty. At the event, Staniszewski said artists could use ElevenLabs' AI music generator to create an original track and then blast out the song to the entire party. "For us, that space is so important, just to show the art of the possible," he said. Part of the firm's mandate is to make "goosebump-inducing introductions that others can't," Pierrepont said, "just given, you know, the unique folks that are in this community." A VC firm is born Iconiq's prized community is also driving its growing VC ambitions. The firm first raised money for a venture capital fund in 2013, spurred partly by the desire to bring up-and-coming entrepreneurs into its network, said Will Griffith, founding partner of Iconiq's VC arm. Another reason to invest in startups was that Iconiq's existing network could surface "interesting investment opportunities," said Anders, an Iconiq co-founder, in an interview with Bloomberg last year. Many of Iconiq's wealth management clients are also investors in its VC funds. The creation of the new unit was spearheaded by Makan and Griffith. At the time, Iconiq had ties to companies like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. But the firm decided not to focus on then-hot consumer-facing businesses. It instead chased investments in software as a service, or SaaS. "Everyone, at that point in time, was focused on consumer," Griffith said. "We made a very big decision from inception to go after SaaS, which was much less well understood." The result was key bets on companies like Snowflake Inc. and Datadog Inc., both of which are now publicly traded. Iconiq's third venture capital fund, a $1.33 billion effort launched in 2016, returned a formidable 4.7 times investors' money as of the end of last year, driven by profitable bets on companies like Snowflake, GitLab Inc. and Procore Technologies, according to a person familiar with the matter. Those deals helped vault the vehicle into the top 5% of funds launched that year, according to Cambridge Associates benchmarks. The person familiar with the numbers asked not to be identified because VC returns are almost never made public and are generally considered to be a closely guarded secret. Performance data for Iconiq's three most recent funds, which include the vast majority of its AI deals, could not be learned. But some signs point to good news for limited partners, at least on paper. When Iconiq first invested in ElevenLabs, the company was valued at about $3 billion; that's jumped to $11 billion. Iconiq also invested in a competitive financing for Sierra, a customer service upstart led by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor last valued at $10 billion. And the firm has seen its stake in Legora, a legal AI startup, spike in value since its initial investment last year. Today, some 100 of the firm's 550 employees work in its venture practice -- a total that comes out to a little under one employee per portfolio company. Picking relatively few startups to bet on, the firm is almost always the lead investor in the deals it does work on. "Our ambition is to become a primary capital partner to these companies," investing in multiple rounds, Pierrepont said. "It's one of the reasons why our portfolio is so concentrated -- it's so that we make sure we have enough resources to devote to those relationships to earn that right over time." Going forward, the firm is expanding the types of VC bets it typically does. That includes moving beyond software into capital-intensive sectors like robotics. It's also doing more investing in earlier, less proven startups. In the last seven years, about half of its investments went to early-stage companies generating less than $10 million in recurring revenue. (One of the firm's first bets was in Figma's seed round, Griffith said.) Iconiq also expects to keep increasing the investments it makes in young companies. And recently, the firm did its first-ever incubation, backing a startup launched by one of its partners. "It's never too early for an entrepreneur to meet Iconiq," said partner Murali Joshi. Funding rounds for top companies "move super swiftly," so by the time a startup's team is actively fundraising, "if you're meeting them for the very first time, you're behind." The expansive VC bets aren't without controversy. The most obvious criticism of a firm like Iconiq is that as its venture capital operation grows, it presents conflicts of interest with its core business of managing money. One of its securities filings mentions the term "conflict of interest" 21 times, noting that as Iconiq works with some of tech's most powerful people and companies, their motivations might be at odds with one another or potentially with the firm itself. In a VC context, that could mean recommending its own funds over external investment opportunities, or advising startups and clients that compete. In 2018, Iconiq co-founder Boeding left to launch a competitor. When that firm made its debut, it specifically promised not to peddle its own venture or private equity funds to wealth clients. Iconiq said it assiduously manages any conflicts. Despite the overlap in financial interests, Jacobson said Iconiq's VC and wealth teams operate with strict confidentiality. "If a portfolio company that's competing with one of our client's companies shares information, that information never travels across that boundary," he said. "We've had situations where clients have wanted to acquire portfolio companies that we didn't want to sell." The Anthropic gamble Last year's Middle East tour for Anthropic executives, one of a string of international trips the company has made, came at a vital time for the startup. Amodei had been skeptical of working with countries in the Gulf, lamenting the possibility of enriching "dictators," but he eventually relented. "Unfortunately, I think 'no bad person should ever benefit from our success' is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on," he wrote in a memo over the summer, acknowledging Anthropic had to tap into larger sources of capital to meet his company's immense spending needs. Luckily, Iconiq has deep relationships in the region. Anthropic and Iconiq declined to comment on the trip. The startup was not actively fundraising at the time, according to people familiar with the matter, and the meetings were part of an effort to build relationships in the region, some of which were preexisting. Anthropic isn't the only company Iconiq has made global introductions for. ElevenLabs' Staniszewski also made a similar trip across the Middle East, meeting a mix of customers and investors. "We weren't in fundraising mode, so the expectation was very clear that we are first and foremost coming from the commercial side," he said. "And that funding might be something we are interested in in the medium term as well." In February, Anthropic announced a new funding round that effectively doubled its valuation to $380 billion -- a deal co-led by several investors, including Iconiq and MGX. Qatar Investment Authority also participated in the round. Iconiq has bet billions of dollars and much of its VC reputation on Anthropic's success. A majority of the firm's $5.2 billion in AI investments to date has gone into the startup. Makan has also joined the board as an observer, Anthropic said, making him a key player at the fast-growing company. Still, for Iconiq, there are risks to investing so much energy and capital into a single startup, particularly in such a volatile industry. Last month, Anthropic was labeled a supply chain risk by the Pentagon, the result of a spectacular blowup over AI safeguards. The startup went on to tell a judge that it could lose billions of dollars in revenue this year after the supply-risk designation. Like other AI rivals, Anthropic is also burning vast amounts of cash to build and hone its models. Iconiq first met with Anthropic in 2023. It didn't invest at the time, when the company was relatively small. Instead, it reentered the picture in 2025, leading the company's Series F funding round at a $183 billion valuation. While the deal was a little late, and hazards remain, the investment could pay off in spades for the firm. Iconiq owns less than 2% of the startup, according to Bloomberg's estimates. That stake would be worth in the ballpark of $7 billion at the company's current valuation, which could rise substantially if it goes public this year, netting Iconiq huge returns. This month, some investors have approached Anthropic asking it to take their money at a valuation of about $800 billion or higher, which would make it one of the most valuable startups in the world. Krishna Rao, Anthropic's chief financial officer, said it was important for the company to work with a firm that has a global network. In addition to raising money from the Middle East, Anthropic has also brought in capital from GIC and Temasek, Singaporean state investment firms. "The benefits of AI are not specific to one country or one region," Rao said. "So we've really diversified our investor base -- and Iconiq has helped us do that." Rao added: "They're very, very focused on global and international relationships, which we saw as extremely valuable." There are also other, less tangible benefits to having a close relationship with Anthropic. Max Junestrand -- CEO of Legora, another Iconiq portfolio company -- said that the connections were helpful for his startup. "The fact that they're big investors in Anthropic, and we work closely with them and many of the other AI labs too, has been fantastic," Junestrand said. "Iconiq has certainly been able to help us navigate that organization and get us preferential treatment." Iconiq tends to pick a few winners, rather than backing a range of companies in one industry. Junestrand said that strategy was important when it came to trusting the firm not to back a competitor in legal AI. "It's a foundational thing, and if that weren't there, then I wouldn't be speaking to them," he said. However, the scale of the AI boom has meant that the firm has invested in rivals. In addition to backing Anthropic, Iconiq also has a stake in OpenAI. It has put more than $150 million into the company, via direct investment and through an earlier bet on the startup Statsig, which OpenAI acquired. Jacobson declined to comment on the firm's stakes, but said of OpenAI and Anthropic: "I don't think their success comes at the cost of each other." Industry fears of a bubble aside, Jacobson believes that the AI boom is still a good investment -- and that the particular needs of AI companies, and the limited pool of people who can help, plays to Iconiq's strengths. "If you're a large-scale AI company, you need to get to know some of the deepest pools of capital, the heads of state, the biggest players," Jacobson said. "A partner like Iconiq can facilitate those discussions probably better than anyone else in the world."