Menlo Ventures announced $3 billion in funds on Tuesday, the most important increase in its 50-year historical past, pushed largely by its AI portfolio, particularly Anthropic. Its stake within the mannequin maker is now value about $14 billion, sources told Bloomberg.
To listen to the oldsters at Menlo discuss it, they have been white-knuckling it once they made a bet-the-firm $750 million funding in Anthropic in 2024, preemptively main the mannequin maker’s Sequence D. On the time, that spherical quadrupled the startup’s valuation to $18.4 billion.
Whereas the wager itself was arguably not wildly dangerous, the means by which the agency raised that sort of capital was extra so.
Menlo had been an early investor, earlier than Anthropic had a product. By 2024, lengthy earlier than Claude Code and Claude Mythos, the corporate was displaying indicators of success. It had landed a $4 billion deal from Amazon and was being hotly pursued by VCs, having been based by former OpenAI researchers, together with siblings CEO Dario Amodei and president Daniela Amodei. It was a rising-star AI firm, as so many startups based by OpenAI alum nonetheless are immediately.
However how Menlo raised the funds was eye-popping. In 2024, the enterprise world was simply rebounding from the post-pandemic VC winter, with big-money companies like SoftBank and Tiger International nonetheless licking their wounds. Nobody was writing checks for three-quarters of a billion {dollars}.
Menlo structured the majority of deal, about $500 million value, as a particular function automobile, or SPV — a one-off funding entity created to pool cash from a number of sources for a single deal. Menlo additionally contributed $250 million from its personal fund and contributions from Menlo insiders, sources told Forbes at the time, bringing the full spherical to $750 million.
Since then, AI SPVs have turn out to be as commonplace as cockroaches, with Anthropic a specific goal — a lot in order that the AI firm issued a warning final month, calling all unauthorized SPVs and secondary markets claiming to promote its inventory “scams.”
However for these traders in Menlo’s licensed 2024 deal, the aggressive push paid off handsomely. Menlo went on to spend money on the company’s Series E and F.
On high of that, Menlo adopted up by launching a $100 million startup fund with Anthropic in 2024, which they cutely named Anthology. That fund has since ballooned into capital deployed thus far nearer to $250 million, a supply with data of the fund tells TechCrunch. It has not solely backed 60+ firms (and provided them assist, like entry to Anthropic leaders and credit for Claude), however has additionally produced quite a few returns already. These embody Graphite, acquired by Cursor, and Astrix Safety, acquired by Cisco.
The fund has allowed Menlo to get its finger of the heart beat of AI startups, classes, and tech, on the earliest levels. The VC agency has since constructed a broader rep for AI investing, counting AI stars like OpenRouter, Higgsfield, Legora, Lovable, OpenEvidence, and lots of others in its portfolio.
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