May 2023. Zoom had just endured a post-pandemic stock collapse of 85% from its peak, was actively seeking new growth opportunities, and signed a partnership with an then-unknown AI startup Anthropic. A $51 million investment through Zoom Ventures looked like a technical deposit for future integration — not a bet on the next player in the industry.
Two years later, that stake is worth $1.27 billion.
What happened to the numbers
According to regulatory filings disclosed on May 22, Zoom invested a total of approximately $97 million in two tranches — roughly $51 million in May 2023 and another $46 million later. As Bloomberg reports, the current market value of this stake is $1.27 billion. The multiplier: over 13x in two years.
For comparison: Zoom's core business in the first quarter of 2025 generated revenue of $1.24 billion — meaning this entire investment already equals one quarter of the company's revenue.
Why Anthropic grew so much
Anthropic went from being a niche competitor to OpenAI to a company valued at over $61 billion at the time of Zoom's data disclosure. According to CEO Dario Amodei, usage and revenue alone grew 80-fold in the first quarter of 2025. Anthropic is currently in talks about a new funding round worth up to $30 billion — at a company valuation of around $900 billion, according to Bloomberg.
"The strategic stake was initially positioned to integrate Claude large language models into Zoom's federated AI architecture"
— from Zoom's regulatory filing to the SEC
The paradox: success that wasn't planned
Zoom is not a venture fund. The company invested in Anthropic not as a financial speculator, but to gain access to Claude for its own products: AI Companion, meeting transcriptions, auto-summaries. In other words, the $97 million was essentially payment for technological partnership — and the billion-dollar profit turned out to be a side effect.
This puts management in an uncomfortable position: what to do with the paper profit? Selling the stake means locking in gains, but losing a strategic asset at a moment when Anthropic could become one of the key AI infrastructure providers. Holding it means remaining hostage to the valuation volatility of a private company.
Context: not just Zoom
Amazon ($4 billion in Anthropic) and Google (up to $2 billion) made similar bets. But their investments are a deliberate strategy to diversify their AI portfolio. Zoom found itself in this company almost by accident: through product necessity, not venture logic.
- Amazon integrated Claude into AWS Bedrock and made Anthropic a central AI partner for its cloud business
- Google embedded Claude in competitive analysis and its own products
- Zoom uses Claude in AI Companion — but this is one of dozens of tools in a federated architecture, not an exclusive bet
The difference is significant: for Amazon and Google, Anthropic is a strategic necessity. For Zoom — a fortunate accident.
If Anthropic indeed closes a round at a $900 billion valuation and goes public within the next two years, Zoom's stake could be worth twice as much — but only if the company doesn't sell it earlier under pressure from shareholders who now see this asset as an easy way to finance ZM share buybacks.
