Anthropic IPO: Who are the 4 Indian-origin leaders behind the Claude maker?

Anthropic, the San Francisco company behind the Claude AI models, has made its long-awaited public IPO filing.

The move puts its leadership bench under the lens, including four Indian-origin executives who run finance, technology, coding products and governance.

Krishna Rao manages the finances behind the company’s expansion, Rahul Patil leads the technology behind its models, Sid Bidasaria helped build its fast-growing coding tool, and Neil “Buddy” Shah helps keep the company tied to its AI mission.

India is among the most important markets for Claude, and the prospectus shows how much of Anthropic’s future rests on finance, infrastructure and governance, the areas these four oversee.

What Anthropic filed on October 26

Anthropic’s publicly filed IPO prospectus shows strong revenue growth alongside massive spending. The company plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ANT. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the offering.

The filing is the first detailed look at the company’s finances. The headline numbers read:

On valuation, Anthropic was valued at $965 billion as of May, above rival OpenAI’s $852 billion mark from March. Reports have claimed that Anthropic was targeting a valuation between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion.

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The Wall Street Journal added that Anthropic separately told investors third-quarter revenue hit $16.8 billion, up 45 per cent from the second quarter.

A Bloomberg report also said Anthropic is aiming for a Nasdaq debut before the US Thanksgiving holiday on November 26, with a roadshow possibly starting the week of November 9.

Who the four Indian-origin leaders at Anthropic are

Krishna Rao, Chief Financial Officer

Rao is the person most directly responsible for turning Anthropic’s growth into a financing plan that public-market investors can underwrite.

He joined as the company’s first finance chief in May 2024, after serving as CFO of Fanatics Commerce and as global head of corporate and business development at Airbnb.

His résumé reads like a preparation for this moment. At Airbnb he helped navigate the pandemic and played a key role in the company’s IPO and private financings.

He was also the first CFO at healthcare payments platform Cedar, and earlier worked as a private equity investor at Blackstone and a strategy consultant at Bain & Company. He holds a JD from Yale Law School and an economics degree from Harvard.

At Anthropic, his job is securing and paying for computing power. Rao has said he spends 30 per cent to 40 per cent of his time on compute procurement, which he calls among the most consequential and hardest decisions in the company.

The scale is visible in the prospectus. Recent estimates put compute commitments at $518 billion, including $111.1 billion with Google, $110 billion with Amazon and $31.4 billion with Microsoft over seven to ten years.

The filing says Anthropic must make binding compute commitments months or years before the capacity is used, with limited ability to adjust, and that some agreements carry take-or-pay terms that require payment regardless of use.

Rao also has to manage a revenue base that is primarily consumption-based and largely not tied to long-term contracts. Rao was reportedly born in Minneapolis.

Rahul Patil, Chief Technology Officer

Patil is the most visibly India-linked of the four. He is a PESIT graduate, and he grew up in Bengaluru.

Anthropic announced on October 7, 2025 that he had joined as CTO. He was most recently CTO of Stripe, and before that held senior engineering roles at AWS, Microsoft and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

He took over from co-founder Sam McCandlish, who moved to chief architect. As CTO, Patil oversees compute, infrastructure, inference and a range of other engineering work. Both report to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei.

Patil’s remit matters directly to the IPO story. Demand for Claude has outrun supply at times, and the prospectus says demand for AI will be limited principally by the availability of compute.

The company’s ability to serve customers reliably while managing that constraint sits largely with the CTO’s organisation. Patil’s pitch from his Stripe years, building dependable systems that businesses rely on, is what Anthropic’s announcement highlighted.

Sid Bidasaria, Claude code engineer

Bidasaria is the least senior in title but arguably the closest to the product driving Anthropic’s revenue growth. He has been touted as the technical lead for Claude Code, while Anthropic’s own developer-conference pages list him as a speaker from the Claude Code team.

His formal title on earlier event pages is Member of Technical Staff.

The Pragmatic Engineer describes him as engineer number two on Claude Code. The project began with Boris Cherny, and Bidasaria joined him after arriving at Anthropic in November.

He describes himself as part of Claude Code’s founding team, and previously worked at Robinhood and Rubrik. He reportedly studied at The Doon School in Dehradun and worked at Citrix and Propelo before Anthropic.

Claude Code began as an internal experiment and became a major business. Its annualised revenue run rate reached $2.5 billion in February earlier this year. The tool has become central to how developers use Claude.

It is also a reason Indian IT services firms are watching Anthropic closely. At February’s AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Infosys and Anthropic announced a partnership to use Claude and the Claude Code agent in the Infosys Topaz platform.

Neil “Buddy” Shah, chair of the long-term benefit trust

Shah has no product or operating role, but his position may be the most unusual feature of the IPO. He is CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, chair of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust, and board chair of IDinsight.

He was named as the Trust’s chair among its initial trustees. He previously worked as managing director of GiveWell and co-founded IDinsight.

The Trust matters because of what the S-1 says about control. Through a special class of stock, Class T, the Trust generally has the authority to elect and remove directors who together make up a majority of the board.

The Trust’s members are meant to be financially disinterested. They hold no equity in Anthropic. The IPO pairs this with a second structure.

Anthropic will issue a single Class F share to a Founder LLC organised by its co-founders. That share carries 50.1 per cent of the vote on major decisions, and the filing says the arrangement could lead to decisions that cut against investors’ financial interests.

For public-market investors, this is a defining trade-off. Shah’s trust and the founders’ special share together limit what ordinary shareholders can do.

They are also the company’s stated answer to the pressure that comes with a trillion-dollar valuation. Former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke was appointed to the Trust in July.

Why India is watching

India is one of Anthropic’s strongest user markets. It ranks as the second-largest user base for Claude, with usage skewing toward technical and work-related tasks such as software development.

The company has been building a local presence. It appointed former Microsoft India head Irina Ghose as India managing director in January.

The Bengaluru office opened in February, Anthropic’s second in Asia-Pacific after Tokyo.

Chief executive Dario Amodei has also been a visible presence in the country. He visited in October 2025 and met corporate executives and lawmakers, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Direct participation will be harder for individual investors. Investing in the Claude IPO directly from India is not possible, and US IPOs generally limit retail allocation.

Indian investors will most likely gain exposure through funds or after the stock begins trading, subject to their brokerage’s access to US markets.

With inputs from agencies