Jaan Tallinn's angel investments, from DeepMind to Anthropic
Anthropic filed to go public on 26 October 2026, after a private round in May valued it at $965B. Jaan Tallinn, the Estonian programmer who wrote much of Kazaa and Skype, led its first round in 2021. This page sets his angel record against the most active angel investors worldwide.
Anthropic raised $124M in its first round in May 2021, a few months after it was founded. Tallinn led that round, alongside Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, and put money in again in 2022. He has not disclosed the size of his stake. He holds it through Metaplanet, his investment company, and sits on Anthropic's board as an observer, not a director.
He had made a similar early bet ten years earlier. He invested in DeepMind, the London AI lab, and sat on its board until Google bought it in 2014. In both cases he says he invested to have a say in how the companies handle the risks of AI, which he has warned about for more than a decade.
The Anthropic listing puts him among the biggest individual winners of the offering. Below are the companies in his own angel portfolio that Dealroom counts as unicorns, by their latest valuation.
Six of the 44 companies in Jaan Tallinn's angel portfolio became unicorns
Source: Dealroom.co
From Kazaa to Skype
Tallinn was born in Tallinn, Estonia, in 1972. At school he and two classmates, Ahti Heinla and Priit Kasesalu, wrote Kosmonaut, in 1989 the first Estonian computer game sold abroad. In 1993 the three set up Bluemoon, a software company, and in 1996 he graduated in theoretical physics from the University of Tartu.
Around 2000 the three wrote the peer-to-peer software behind Kazaa, a file-sharing service, for Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström and Danish entrepreneur Janus Friis. In 2003 they reused it to build Skype with the same pair. Tallinn sold his Skype shares when eBay bought the company in 2005 for $2.6B. He started investing in 2011 through Metaplanet, and co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge in 2012 and the Future of Life Institute in 2014.
How he compares with other angels
Dealroom tracks more than 50,000 individual angel investors. The ranking below takes the 620 most active and highest-ranked of them, and counts how many companies each backed that went on to be valued at $1B or more. It uses each angel's personal Dealroom record. Metaplanet, Tallinn's investment company, has its own record, which is not added in.
Angel investors who backed the most unicorns
Source: Dealroom.co
Among the 97 angels based in Europe, Tallinn ranks ninth by number of unicorns. He is one of four with six, behind six who have more. Dealroom lists him in Cambridge, where he co-founded the existential-risk centre. Oliver Jung leads in Europe with 19, then Taavet Hinrikus, a Wise co-founder and fellow Estonian, with 14. Worldwide Tallinn ranks 127th of the 620. Elad Gil, an early investor in Stripe, Airbnb and Anduril, leads with 63, followed by Peter Thiel with 44 and Naval Ravikant with 34.
Counted by value, he ranks higher. Two of his six companies are now worth $10B or more: Anthropic and ŌURA. Eight European angels in the ranking backed a company worth $100B or more, and Tallinn is one of them. Only Oliver Jung backed two, Revolut and Airbnb.
At $965B, Anthropic is the most valuable company in the portfolio of nine of the 620 angels, Tallinn included. Another 22 backed a company worth more: SpaceX, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon or Tesla.
What this means
Tallinn makes fewer angel investments than the most active angels, and six of his 44 companies have reached $1B. One of them, Anthropic, is about to list as one of the most valuable companies in the world. He led its first round to have a say in how it handles the risks of AI, and he has said he will put the proceeds into AI-safety work.