This Week in IPOs: OPay Prices as Anthropic's Growth Slows
OPay's US IPO priced at the low end of its range this week, while Anthropic's amended S-1 showed slower sequential growth and a swing to an operating loss.
Two filings moved this week, and they tell opposite stories about where the IPO market's attention is going. OPay, a SoftBank-backed fintech, actually priced and will begin trading — the kind of ordinary, completed transaction that Zorro's recent-IPO tracker exists to follow. Anthropic, the company every banker on Wall Street is waiting on, did not price anything. It filed an amendment that updated its numbers without setting a date, and the numbers it disclosed are messier than the ones that came out in October.
The week's actual deal
OPay set terms on October 23 for 16 million ADSs priced between $19 and $21, which would have put the company's market value at roughly $4.2 billion at the midpoint. It priced at the bottom of that range, raising about $304 million and landing closer to a $4 billion valuation — a discount to its own initial ask, though still double the $2 billion valuation it carried in a 2021 funding round. The company reported roughly 50 million monthly active users as of July 31, concentrated mostly in Nigeria despite being incorporated in Singapore. Alongside the public offering, OPay arranged a concurrent private placement of up to $200 million to Standard Bank, a structure that lets a large strategic investor take a stake without competing for shares in the public book. It was effectively the week's only US deal of size, consistent with a pattern that has held since banks started clearing the calendar ahead of Anthropic.
Anthropic's amendment moves the number, not the date
Anthropic filed Amendment No. 1 to its S-1 on November 2, six days after the original public filing. The share count and price range are still blank — an amendment updates financial disclosure and risk factors, not deal terms, so a date for an actual price range still has to come in a later filing. What changed is the picture underneath. Third-quarter revenue came in at roughly $16.8 billion, up about 46% from the second quarter's $11.6 billion and far above the $1.4 billion booked in the same quarter a year earlier. On Zorro's IPO pipeline, where Anthropic has carried the highest probability rating of any company tracked since the filing went public, that quarterly figure is now baked into the listing.
The sequential growth rate is the part worth sitting with. Revenue roughly doubled from Q1 to Q2 — a jump of about 147%. From Q2 to Q3, the increase was about 46%. Both quarters still show enormous year-over-year growth, and a company growing 46% in a single quarter from an $11.6 billion base is still growing fast by any normal company's standard. But the rate of acceleration that defined the first half of the year is no longer accelerating; it's decelerating from an extraordinary pace toward a merely very fast one, and underwriters pricing a trillion-dollar-plus IPO have to decide how much of the earlier curve they can still extrapolate.
Why the operating loss is the detail, not the net loss headline
Reporting on the amendment also disclosed a $567 million operating loss for the quarter, tied in part to roughly $5 billion in short-term compute spending — the first time the company has shown a loss at the operating level rather than purely in net income. That's a different kind of number than the $80.7 billion net loss disclosed in the original October filing, which was almost entirely a non-cash charge from revaluing convertible notes as the company's implied valuation climbed. An operating loss measures whether the core business — selling AI model access — is covering its own costs before financing and accounting adjustments. A few hundred million dollars of operating loss on billions in quarterly revenue isn't alarming on its own, especially for a company still scaling compute capacity. But it's a number analysts can actually use to judge unit economics, where the net-loss figure from the first filing mostly measured accounting mechanics instead.
That distinction matters because reporting around the amendment also said institutional investors have been pushing back on valuation, with some advising a figure closer to $1.5–1.6 trillion rather than the $2 trillion some earlier coverage floated. An operating loss, even a modest one, gives the skeptical side of that conversation something concrete to point to that a revaluation charge doesn't.
What's still parked behind it
The rest of the pipeline hasn't moved because it's still waiting on Anthropic to go first. SB Energy, Switch, Nscale, and DayOne Data Centers all remain in the pipeline without a priced date, and none of them wants to compete with a listing of this size for institutional order-book attention. The current reporting still points to a roadshow opening the week of November 9 and pricing the week of November 16, with the company aiming to finish before the Thanksgiving holiday on November 26. None of that is locked in — the amendment itself is evidence that details can still shift this close to a listing — but it's the first week where the obstacle in front of the rest of the calendar got more specific numbers attached to it, even without a price range.