ETMarkets Smart Talk | From SpaceX to Anthropic: Subho Moulik decodes a step-by-step guide for Indian investors

The buzz around US tech IPOs has reached a new level, with names such as SpaceX and Anthropic drawing investor attention even before their public-market journeys fully unfold.

But for Indian investors, investing in these high-profile companies involves more than simply opening an overseas brokerage account.

From accessing US IPOs and understanding pre-IPO opportunities to navigating the Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS), taxation and the risks of buying into highly anticipated listings, there are several layers to consider.


In this edition of ETMarkets Smart Talk, Subho Moulik, Founder & CEO of Appreciate, breaks down the US investing opportunity for Indian investors.

He explains why a delayed Anthropic IPO does not necessarily signal a red flag, what SpaceX’s sharp post-listing swings reveal about IPO pricing and limited float, and how investors can distinguish businesses with real AI-driven revenues and profits from those benefiting primarily from the AI narrative.

He also decodes the rules around US IPO access, pre-IPO investing, paperwork, taxation and overseas investment limits for Indian investors. Edited Excerpts -

Q) Anthropic has reportedly pushed back its IPO plans. Should investors see this as a red flag, or is postponing an IPO simply part of the normal listing process?

A) A postponement of a few weeks is a normal part of an IPO calendar, because the timing of a listing is decided after the filing, once the company and its bankers can see the market they are selling into.

What Anthropic has put on the record is a confidential draft S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 31 May, with the number of shares, the price and the timing all left open and tied to market conditions.

The slip in the headlines is Reuters reporting, through unnamed sources, that the launch window has moved from late August or early September to mid-October, and the company itself has named no date. So the calendar has moved by a month or so, and nothing the company has filed or said has changed.

A company that has just raised $65bn in a Series H round, a late-stage private funding round, at a $965bn post-money valuation, its value immediately after the round closed, carries no funding pressure forcing a listing date.

It can let the calendar move with market conditions, which is what Anthropic's own statement in May reserved the right to do. A genuine red flag looks different: a withdrawn filing, a restated financial number, or a valuation cut against the last private round. The filing stands, and the last private valuation stands.

For an Indian investor the exact filing date carries less weight than it first appears to. Access to Anthropic's shares comes through the open market on Nasdaq once trading begins, buying from other holders at whatever price the market sets that day, so the working date for planning purposes is the first trading day plus whatever holding period the investor intends.

Q) Are investors currently valuing AI companies on today's earnings, or on what they believe these companies could become five or ten years from now?

A) Both, and the line between them runs through how much of the business is already in the accounts. The established listed AI ecosystem companies are priced on earnings they have already booked.

Nvidia's fiscal second quarter, ended 26 July 2026, brought in $96.2bn of revenue, up 106% year on year, at a 75% gross margin, and Microsoft closed its 2026 fiscal year with $331.8bn of revenue, up 18%.

Nvidia doubling revenue at that margin, and Microsoft adding 18% to a base that size, are being valued on profit that exists today, and each share price moves when the next quarter confirms or misses it.

Private frontier labs sit on a different footing. Anthropic raised $65bn in a Series H round in May 2026 at a $965bn post-money valuation. That is roughly 2.5 times the $380bn it carried in February 2026, three months earlier.

Its annualised run-rate revenue, the current pace of sales expressed as a full-year figure, was $47bn in the same month, so the round valued the company at about 20 times that figure.

A private round at that pace prices what the lab could become over five to ten years, because there is no quarterly earnings print yet to anchor it to.

SpaceX sits between the two. It has been a listed stock since June, but the price it listed at rested on trajectory, because the S-1 showed 2025 revenue of $18.67bn against an operating loss of $2.59bn, so the offer was valuing where its launch, satellite and AI businesses go from here.

Both layers are being priced against their own available evidence, the established layer on earnings delivered and the frontier layer on trajectory. The verdict on how this will play out has still not come in though early trading has seen price moderation.

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Q) We've seen investors aggressively chase some of the biggest AI names. How do you distinguish genuine long-term AI winners from companies benefiting mainly from the AI narrative?

A) Any company that anchors on demonstrated AI capabilities in a filing picks up part of the lift from that narrative, and that lift attaches whether or not the business is earning revenue from the theme.

Three tests separate the two. The first is whether the revenue is real, already booked, and earned at a real margin. Nvidia's data centre segment produced 92.5% of the company's $96.2bn quarterly revenue in the quarter ended 26 July 2026, at a 75% gross margin for the company as a whole.

The second is whether the capital spending is paid for out of operations. Microsoft spent $115.9bn on capital expenditure in fiscal 2026 against $331.8bn of revenue, and a fiscal 2026 operating margin of 46.8% means that spending came out of operating profit.

The third is whether the profit on the page came from operations or from marking up a stake in someone else.

Amazon's second-quarter 2026 net income of $62.6bn included a $53.4bn pre-tax fair-value gain on its holding in Anthropic, against operating income of $27.5bn, and only the smaller number is what the business earned by trading. A company passes all three when its revenue, its spending and its profit each trace back to the operating business.

The frontier labs and the newly listed names cannot pass these tests yet, because the customer accounts that would drive real revenues and profits do not all exist yet. For them the test is how fast new accounts and revenue catch up with the price. Durability shows in the accounts before it shows in the financial commentary.

The Nasdaq-100 holds the companies clearing these tests at their current weights, which delivers the exposure without a bet on which single name the narrative favours this quarter.

Q) We have seen the listing of SpaceX. What does the sharp move after listing, and the subsequent correction, tell us about buying into highly anticipated IPOs?

A) The first weeks of trading tell you about demand and very little about the company. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share and listed on Nasdaq on 12 June 2026, closing that first day at $160.95, a gain of 19.2% on the offer.

The close climbed to $211.39 on 16 June, 56.6% above the offer price, then fell to $108.27 by 5 August, a drop of 48.8% from that closing high and 19.8% below the original offer. The stock closed back above the $135 offer price on 10 August.

The mechanism behind that swing sits in the float. SpaceX sold 638.9 million shares for about $85.7bn, and with 13.16 billion shares outstanding after the offering, that is under 5% of the company. The rest sits under the lock-up agreements in the prospectus, 180 days for most holders, which runs to 9 December.

In the first sessions only that 5% could trade, so demand from investors who could not get an allocation at the offer price concentrated into it, and the price discovered sentiment before it discovered anything about the business. The business was already on the record: the S-1 showed 2025 revenue of $18.67bn against an operating loss of $2.59bn.

The low arrived as that picture began to fill in. SpaceX reported its first quarter as a public company on 4 August, revenue of $7.8bn, up 92%, against a net loss of $541m, and the prospectus allowed the first tranche of locked-up shares, up to 20% of those under the 180-day agreement, to be sold from the second trading day after that report.

The $108.27 low was the close on 5 August. The price that says something about the business is the one that settles once results play out and the float widens, and for an Indian investor the 24-month period Indian tax law treats as long-term for foreign shares is also the horizon over which that settled price, more than the listing-day print, decides the return.

Q) Let's start from the basics: Can an Indian resident actually invest in a US IPO such as Anthropic?

A) An Indian resident has no direct route to Anthropic shares at the IPO offer price, and that single limit is where the belief that US IPOs are closed to Indian investors comes from.

An allocation at the offer price reaches a retail investor only through a broker that sits in the underwriting syndicate and chooses to pass shares to its retail clients.

For an Indian investor that route is closed in practice, so access opens once the shares start trading. The regulatory route is settled.

A resident individual can hold listed foreign shares as Overseas Portfolio Investment, or OPI, under RBI's Overseas Investment Directions, 2022, within the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, or LRS, the RBI facility with a $250,000 annual ceiling that covers buying securities abroad.

On the US side, Rule 5130 of FINRA, the self-regulator of the US brokerage industry, restricts allocations at the offer price to a defined list of industry insiders, brokerage staff and people advising the underwriters, and leaves retail investors generally untouched, Indian or otherwise.

Indian IPOs allocate retail shares by lottery. US offer-price allocations run through a syndicate, in which the underwriters place shares with the brokerage clients they serve.

The opportunity that remains is the one every retail investor outside that syndicate gets: buying once trading opens. SpaceX shares were open to any investor with a funded overseas brokerage account from its first day on Nasdaq, and the eight weeks that followed showed how much of the price path plays out after retail entry begins.

From that point an Indian investor is buying on the same open market, on the same terms and from the same day, as a US retail investor.

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Q) How does pre-IPO investing work for an Indian retail investor? Who can access these opportunities, and what are the minimum investment requirements?

A) Unlisted foreign shares fall under Overseas Direct Investment, or ODI, the category RBI's Overseas Investment Directions, 2022, apply to a resident individual's stake in an unlisted foreign company.

That route is permitted only in an operating company, only outside financial services, and only where the foreign company has no subsidiary of its own in which the individual would hold control. It sits inside the same LRS ceiling, reported through the investor's authorised dealer bank.

The practical routes to pre-IPO exposure take three forms. Employee tender offers let option holders sell existing shares to approved buyers. Pooled vehicles collect smaller commitments into a single line on the company's capitalisation table. Secondary trading platforms match sellers of private stock with buyers.

On the US side these routes are generally open only to accredited investors. US securities rules define that status by wealth, with no test of nationality: income above $200,000 a year, or $300,000 with a spouse, in each of the last two years, or net worth above $1 million excluding the primary home.

An Indian resident who meets it qualifies on the US side, and the ODI conditions above govern the Indian side. Two routes sit outside this structure. A US-listed fund that holds stakes in private companies is itself a listed security, so buying it counts as Overseas Portfolio Investment, the simpler category that covers a listed stock.

Funds set up in GIFT City, India's international financial services centre, have been open to resident individuals under LRS since RBI permitted remittances to the centre for investment in securities in February 2021.

The minimum ticket is set by the vehicle structuring the deal and varies by route. The regulator sets the perimeter and the ceiling, and the vehicle sets the ticket.

Q) What paperwork does an Indian investor need before buying US stocks: PAN, KYC, Form W-8BEN, overseas brokerage account, or anything else?

A) The list is shorter than it looks, and most of it is done once. A PAN and KYC with the authorised dealer bank cover identity. Each remittance carries a Form A2 declaration to that bank stating its purpose, and draws down the $250,000 annual ceiling under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme.

The overseas brokerage account needs a Form W-8BEN, which certifies non-US status so that US dividends are withheld at the India-US treaty rate of 25%, against the statutory 30% without it, and the form stays valid to the end of the third calendar year after signing. For growth-oriented investors holding companies that pay little or no dividend, the rate rarely comes into play and the form is a one-time account formality.

Once LRS remittances for the financial year, added up across purposes, cross ₹10 lakh, the bank collects TCS, tax collected at source, at 20% on the amount above that line, under the Finance Acts of 2023 and 2025. This is a tax advance, fully creditable against the final tax bill.

A salaried investor recovers it through Form 12BAA filed with the employer, an investor with business income sets it against advance tax instalments, and whatever remains comes back as a refund or adjustment when the return is filed. At tax time the holding is reported in Schedule FA, the foreign assets section of the return, regardless of its value.

On a platform like Appreciate, this regulatory layer sits inside the account-opening flow, so the investor completes one onboarding and the paperwork above is what runs underneath it.

Q) Is the taxation different if I invest in a US IPO, buy the stock after listing, or invest through a US-focused mutual fund or ETF?

A) An IPO allocation and a purchase made after listing are the same asset for Indian tax purposes: both are foreign equity, and the tax treatment turns on how long the shares are held before sale. The clock runs from the purchase date, or from the allotment date for shares received in the IPO, with the offer price as the cost.

Held for more than 24 months, the gain is long-term and taxed at 12.5% without indexation. The ₹1.25 lakh exemption on long-term gains does not apply, because it covers only Indian equity on which securities transaction tax is paid. Held for 24 months or less, the gain is short-term and taxed at the investor's income slab rate.

Dividends are taxed at slab rate in both cases, with the 25% US withholding under the tax treaty creditable against the Indian tax through Form 67. A US-listed ETF bought directly carries the same treatment, because it falls in the same category of foreign security under Indian tax rules.

An India-domiciled fund that itself invests in US equities diverges from that picture. Buying it involves no remittance abroad, so no TCS arises at purchase, and the tax on gains turns on the sale date.

For units sold from 1 April 2025 onward, gains on units held more than 24 months are taxed at 12.5% without indexation, and gains on shorter holdings at slab rate, matching the direct-holding rule above.

For units bought from 1 April 2023 and sold in the two financial years before that, gains were taxed at slab rate regardless of how long the units were held.

However, the RBI’s cap on inflows into such funds, that has already been reached, means that there are no current avenues to access such funds unless the regulatory cap changes.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views, and opinions given by experts are their own. These do not represent the views of the Economic Times)