Codes of Culture | Issue 109
Anthropic confidentially files for IPO.
Welcome back to Codes of Culture. I’m Ashumi Sanghvi.
I’m in Luxembourg for New Space Capital’s AGM this week and looking forward to meeting their portfolio companies and learning more about their ambitions, including a tour of SES - the world’s largest multi-orbit satellite network company.
From the offices of Google to punting with the Minister of AI, Kanishka Narayan, on the River Cam and ending with a dinner to introduce the family offices in our network to some of the top Indian tech founders, it was an action-packed trip with the SPF India delegation on their UK safari. Shared a recap here.
June is our busiest month, with so many events. Ending with what has lined up to be a fantastic week for Cannes Lions. If you are an investor, tech founder, or brand leader at Cannes Lions, reply to us to find out what we are up to!
If you are new here, or want to catch up on the best of Codes of Culture, we’d recommend you start here and remember to subscribe for full access to our news, insights, podcast and global events.
📖In this issue:
Anthropic files confidentially for proposed IPO.
The Enhanced Games make their Vegas Debut.
Bad Bunny and Zara turn cultural relevance into a sell-out drop.
Alo’s wellness-driven luxury yacht activation.
Jennifer Aniston’s brand, LolaVie, drove sales by 40%.
1. AI CAPITAL AND THE PUBLIC MARKETS
Anthropic files confidentially for proposed IPO.
What’s happening: On 1 June, Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the SEC for a proposed IPO. Share count and price have not been set. The filing follows the company’s recent $65 billion Series H and signals that one of the most consequential AI companies of the private-market cycle is preparing for the next phase.
TLDR:
Anthropic moved from major private financing to a confidential IPO filing in rapid succession. The sequencing looks deliberate.
The filing matters beyond Anthropic itself. Public markets are about to start pricing frontier AI more directly.
The next phase of AI financing will be shaped by how investors read revenue quality, infrastructure dependence, and margin potential.
This is the beginning of a new comparison set for the sector, not just another tech IPO.
The listing window for major AI companies is coming into view.
Why it matters: The AI market has so far been priced largely through private conviction, hyperscaler partnerships, and secondary-market expectations. A public filing starts to expose the harder questions: what revenue is durable, what dependence on compute providers looks like in practice, and how much governance complexity public investors are willing to absorb. For capital allocators, enterprise buyers, and operators building against the AI stack, this is the point at which the narrative begins to meet public arithmetic.
2. SPORT, CAPITAL AND CULTURAL DISRUPTION
The Enhanced Games make their Vegas Debut.
What’s happening: The inaugural Enhanced Games took place in Las Vegas on 24 May, with 42 athletes competing in swimming, track and field, and weightlifting under rules that permit the use of FDA-approved performance-enhancing substances under medical supervision. The event is backed by investors including Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr., and Christian Angermayer. One world record was broken by swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, who also received a $1 million bonus.
TLDR:
The Enhanced Games are now real, not hypothetical. The event has happened, and the format is in place.
The capital behind it is serious and ideologically legible. This is as much a regulatory and cultural project as a sporting one.
The commercial opportunity extends beyond tickets to include supplements, longevity products, creator distribution, and wellness adjacencies.
WADA and the IOC condemned it, but neither has meaningful jurisdiction over an event built outside their system.
The core question now is how enhanced performance gets framed for audiences, consumers, and brands.
Why it matters: The most important shift here is not athletic performance. It is permission. The Enhanced Games sit at the intersection of sport, consumer health, media spectacle, and deregulated aspiration. That makes it relevant well beyond athletics. For brands, platforms, and investors tracking the next phase of performance culture, the bigger issue is how quickly the language of enhancement moves from the edge into the mainstream consumer imagination.
3. FASHION COLLABORATION AND CULTURAL DISTRIBUTION
Bad Bunny and Zara turn cultural relevance into a sell-out drop.
What’s happening: Bad Bunny and Zara launched BENITO ANTONIO, a 150-piece Spring/Summer 2026 collection, on 21 May. The collaboration had been seeded for months across highly visible cultural moments, beginning with a custom all-white Zara look at the Super Bowl halftime show and continuing with a black tuxedo developed with Zara for the Met Gala. Developed with longtime creative director Janthony Oliveras and M/M Paris, the collection draws on Puerto Rican visual language and sold rapidly at launch.
TLDR:
Two major cultural placements landed before the formal announcement. The collection arrived after the desire had already been built.
This was not a standard celebrity capsule. The art direction and cultural coding were handled with unusual discipline.
The collection’s scale matters: 150 pieces, not a symbolic drop.
Zara is building a broader collaboration architecture across 2026, and this is one of its clearest expressions.
The release shows how mass retail can still operate with authorship, timing, and point of view.
Why it matters: Zara’s move here is less about celebrity than sequencing. The brand used performance, presence, and visual memory to establish the collection before the customer was ever asked to make a purchase. That is a different model from the old campaign-led collaboration playbook. For fashion operators and brand strategists, the signal is clear: cultural distribution now begins long before the launch date, and the brands that understand how to build anticipation through live moments will hold an advantage over those still relying on announcement mechanics alone.
4. LUXURY, WELLNESS AND EXPERIENCE
Alo’s wellness-driven luxury yacht activation.
What’s happening: Alo has launched two permanent retail locations in Cannes and Saint-Tropez alongside a broader series of Cannes Film Festival activations, including a takeover of the Hotel Martinez pier and a wellness superyacht offering Pilates, recovery therapies, IV treatment, and meditation in the bay before continuing to Monaco for the Grand Prix. The move follows the appointment of Benedetta Petruzzo as international CEO and extends the brand’s Wellness Club footprint beyond cities such as Los Angeles, New York, London, and Seoul.
TLDR:
Alo is not treating the Riviera as an event backdrop. It is building a durable physical presence there.
The Cannes strategy combines real estate, hospitality, and wellness programming into one brand system.
Petruzzo’s arrival gives the expansion more weight. This is being managed with luxury fluency.
The brand is building identity through destination and ritual, not only through product.
Wellness is now being staged in the same geographic and cultural zones that have long been dominated by heritage fashion houses.
Why it matters: Luxury increasingly lives in environments, schedules, and access rather than in the product alone. Alo understands that, and Cannes is being used as a stage on which to make the case. The more interesting development is not that wellness has become premium. It is that wellness now has the confidence to claim a permanent space within one of luxury’s most symbolically charged settings. That changes the competitive map for hospitality, fashion, and experience-led brands alike.
5. BEAUTY, DTC AND PERFORMANCE MEDIA
Jennifer Aniston’s brand, LolaVie, drove sales by 40%.
What’s happening: LolaVie, Jennifer Aniston’s haircare brand, ran its first television campaign using Roku Ads Manager for connected TV. The campaign used a creative concept in which Aniston critiques an over-produced version of her own ad and paired brand storytelling with interactive calls to action via the Roku remote. Roku reports a 40% lift in overall sales across LolaVie.com and Ulta Beauty, alongside a 53% year-on-year increase in new customers.
TLDR:
The headline numbers are strong enough to move this out of the awareness bucket and into channel strategy.
Interactive CTV is narrowing the gap between premium video and direct-response media.
The creative matched the medium. The ad worked because it acknowledged the viewer’s scepticism rather than ignoring it.
LolaVie used CTV to reach beyond its existing organic and social audience.
Premium DTC brands are starting to treat the living room as a measurable conversion environment.
Why it matters: Connected TV has often been discussed as a top-of-funnel channel with nicer creative and weaker attribution. That framing is starting to break down. What LolaVie shows is that streaming inventory, when paired with the right format and a recognisable founder voice, can perform more like acquisition media than many brands still assume. For beauty and consumer brands trying to diversify away from increasingly expensive digital channels, CTV is becoming harder to treat as experimental.