Menlo Ventures raises record $3B fund as Anthropic bet delivers $14B stake

After betting the firm on Anthropic, Menlo Ventures raises victorious $3B fund

Menlo Ventures announced $3 billion in funds on Tuesday, the largest raise in its 50-year history, driven in large part by its AI portfolio, especially Anthropic. Its stake in the model maker is now worth about $14 billion, sources told Bloomberg. To hear the folks at Menlo talk about it, they were white-knuckling it when they made a bet-the-firm $750 million investment in Anthropic in 2024, preemptively leading the model maker's Series D. At the time, that round quadrupled the startup's valuation to $18.4 billion. While the bet itself was arguably not wildly risky, the means by which the firm raised that kind of capital was more so. Menlo had been an early investor, before Anthropic had a product. By 2024, long before Claude Code and Claude Mythos, the company was showing signs of success. It had landed a $4 billion deal from Amazon, and was being hotly pursued by VCs, having been founded by former OpenAI researchers, including siblings CEO Dario Amodei and president Daniela Amodei. It was a rising-star AI company, as so many startups founded by OpenAI alum still are today. But how Menlo raised the funds was eye popping. In 2024, the venture world was just rebounding from the post-pandemic VC winter, with big-money firms like SoftBank and Tiger Global still licking their wounds. No one was writing checks for three-quarters of a billion dollars. Menlo structured the bulk of deal, about $500 million worth, as a special purpose vehicle, or SPV -- a one-off investment entity created to pool money from multiple sources for a single deal. Menlo also contributed $250 million from its own fund and contributions from Menlo insiders, sources told Forbes at the time, bringing the total round to $750 million. Since then, AI SPVs have become as commonplace as cockroaches, with Anthropic a particular target -- so much so that the AI company issued a warning last month, calling all unauthorized SPVs and secondary markets claiming to sell its stock "scams." But for those investors in Menlo's authorized 2024 deal, the aggressive push paid off handsomely. Menlo went on to invested in the company's Series E and F. On top of that, Menlo followed 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 to date closer to $250 million, a source with knowledge of the fund tells TechCrunch. It has not only backed 60+ companies (and offered them support, like access to Anthropic leaders and credits for Claude), but has produced a number of returns already. These include Graphite, acquired by Cursor, and Astrix Security, acquired by Cisco. The fund has allowed Menlo to get its finger of the pulse of AI startups, categories and tech, at the earliest stages. The VC firm has since built a broader rep for AI investing, counting AI stars like OpenRouter, Higgsfield, Legora, Lovable, OpenEvidence and many others in its portfolio.

Menlo Ventures $3bn fund: the Anthropic payoff

Menlo Ventures has raised $3bn, the biggest haul in its 50-year history. It is funded, in effect, by a single bet on Anthropic that is now worth about $14bn. Most venture funds are sold on a promise. Menlo Ventures' new $3bn is sold on a receipt. The firm announced the raise on Tuesday, its largest in 50 years, and the case for it sits in one line item. Menlo's stake in Anthropic is now worth about $14bn, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Menlo first backed Anthropic in 2023, when the company had no product and no revenue. It has put roughly $1bn into the model maker since. Anthropic is now valued at more than $900bn. That is the kind of return that lets a firm raise whatever it wants. The obvious story is the number. The more interesting one is what the raise says about venture capital itself. The AI boom is rewiring how these firms work, and Menlo is a clean example of the change. Two funds, one strategy The $3bn is split in two. Menlo Ventures XVII writes the early cheques, from seed to Series A. Menlo Inflection IV is a growth fund for Series B and beyond. Together, the firm says, they let it back a founder at the start and keep writing cheques as the company scales. That second fund is the tell. Menlo has spent three years selling itself as an early-stage contrarian, the firm that backs companies before the market agrees. A growth vehicle drops it into the same rooms as the largest funds in the world, chasing the same late-stage deals. The pitch is to be a "Goldilocks" firm, present at every round. The risk is that it becomes the very thing it used to undercut. Menlo is not alone in stretching. AI startups now stay private far longer, with Anthropic and Databricks raising Series H and Series L rounds rather than going public. That locks the biggest gains into late-stage rounds, so early backers bolt on growth funds to keep capturing them. Even Benchmark, a famously early-stage firm, recently raised its first growth fund after three decades. Menlo's move is part of a pattern, not a one-off. The bet that paid for everything The Anthropic position did not come cheap, or calmly. In 2024, Menlo led Anthropic's $750m Series D, the largest cheque it had ever written. The round quadrupled the startup's valuation to $18.4bn at the time. The structure was unusual. Menlo put about $500m through a special-purpose vehicle, a one-off entity built to pool money for a single deal. It added $250m from its own fund and from firm insiders. Managing partner Shawn Carolan has called it a "bet-the-firm moment". It worked, and it has since become a template. AI special-purpose vehicles are now everywhere, so common that Anthropic recently warned that many unauthorised ones are simply scams. Menlo did not stop at the cap table. In July 2024, it launched the $100m Anthology Fund with Anthropic to back startups building on the company's technology. That fund has since deployed about $250m across more than 60 companies. Some have already exited, including Graphite, bought by Cursor, and Astrix Security, bought by Cisco. In practice, Anthology works as an early-warning system, showing Menlo where AI applications gain traction before the rest of the market notices. The firm now writes its cheques with conviction. Over the past year, Menlo has put $100m each into Lovable, the Swedish coding startup valued at $6.6bn, the music generator Suno, and the voice-dictation company Wispr. It has also set aside $50m for bets on brand-new research labs, including Flapping Airplanes, valued at $1.5bn at inception. Matt Murphy, the managing partner who led the Anthropic deal, summed up the shift bluntly. "Now we're just fierce," he said. "Let's get after it." Raising into a crowded room The market Menlo is raising into looks nothing like 2023. Kleiner Perkins closed $3.5bn across two AI funds in March. Andreessen Horowitz raised more than $15bn in early 2026, a sum equal to over 18% of all US venture capital raised the year before. Sequoia gathered roughly $7bn for its expansion fund. At $3bn, Menlo is not trying to win on size. It is trying to win on position. "Strong portfolios attract strong founders," partner Venky Ganesan said. The argument is that proximity to category-defining companies is an edge that capital alone cannot buy. Every founder Menlo backs, the firm claims, makes the network a little smarter. The team is the other half of the pitch. Menlo has hired engineers and operators with real technical depth, among them an early Glean engineer, Atlassian's former product chief, and the co-founder of a security firm Palo Alto Networks bought. Founders, the firm argues, want partners who can read the architecture, not just sign the cheque. The history helps the story. Menlo cut a $20m cheque for Uber in 2011, when the company was valued at $322m. It backed Siri, Roku and Hotmail before each became obvious. The firm now manages more than $8.5bn, with over 170 exits behind it. The question under the headline Menlo is raising at a moment of open nerves about an AI bubble. Ganesan did not dodge it. "That's a natural part of any technology cycle," he said. The firm's defence, he added, is discipline on fund size and concentration in the best companies it can find. That is the real test buried under the $3bn headline. Menlo's last cycle was defined by one outlier that returned many times the firm. The next one asks a harder question. Does Menlo need to find another Anthropic, or can it compound the stake it already owns? The answer will decide whether this raise looks visionary or like the top of the market, and nobody, including Menlo, knows which yet.

Anthropic Backer Menlo Ventures Raises $3B In New Funds To Back AI Startups Across Stages

Venture investor Menlo Ventures 1 said Tuesday that it has raised $3 billion in new capital -- the largest new raise in the firm's 50-year history -- to back AI-focused startups across enterprise, healthcare and consumer sectors. The Menlo Park, California-based firm highlighted its early investment in Anthropic, which last month overtook rival OpenAI as the top-valued frontier lab in the world with a staggering $965 billion valuation. While Menlo Ventures' investment in Anthropic's Series C round was not its first bet on artificial intelligence, the firm described it as its "flag-planting moment." "We made our first investment in Anthropic in 2023, when the company was pre-product, pre-revenue. By then, ChatGPT was a household name, and many believed the LLM race was already decided. We saw it differently," the firm wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. "In Dario Amodei and his founding team -- arguably the most accomplished researchers in the field -- we saw the rare mix of technical depth and clarity of purpose that defines a category leader. We were convinced there was room for another independent foundation model company, that Anthropic was the team to build it, and that an investment in Anthropic could anchor our broader AI strategy." The firm went on to lead Anthropic's Series D the following year. "That early relationship gave us a rare vantage point on the model layer and on the infrastructure, workflows, and application opportunities forming around it," the firm said this week. Two new funds The firm's new capital is across two funds: Menlo Ventures XVII, earmarked for seed and Series A startups, and Menlo Inflection IV, a growth fund for Series B and later startups that are "already pulling away from the pack and on their way to becoming the breakout names of the AI era." Along with Anthropic, other notable Menlo Ventures investments over the years include Uber, Roku, Warby Parker, Siri and Gilead Sciences. Anthropic, which has filed plans for a 2026 IPO, would be the largest exit to date for one of its portfolio companies by far, with an expected IPO target of $1 trillion or more.

Early Anthropic backer Menlo lands $3 billion in its largest-ever haul

Menlo is set to announce that it's raised $3 billion for a set of funds dedicated to backing AI startups, marking the venture firm's largest fundraising haul to date. As part of that, Menlo, historically focused on backing newer startups, also intends to pursue more later-stage bets similar in size to its Anthropic investment. In 2024, Menlo Ventures made the risky decision to raise $500 million to invest in Anthropic PBC, then an underdog rival to OpenAI that had yet to generate meaningful revenue or gain mainstream adoption like ChatGPT. Menlo's stake in Anthropic, including an additional $500 million in investments across several rounds, is currently worth nearly $14 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, as the artificial intelligence startup's valuation has soared to more than $900 billion. The large gamble on Anthropic, which Menlo managing partner Shawn Carolan refers to as a "bet-the-firm moment," is now helping to supercharge its clout and investing activity. On Tuesday, Menlo is set to announce that it's raised $3 billion for a set of funds dedicated to backing AI startups, marking the venture firm's largest fundraising haul to date. As part of that, Menlo, historically focused on backing newer startups, also intends to pursue more later-stage bets similar in size to its Anthropic investment. As part of its pivot to focus on AI over the past three years, Menlo has decided to no longer raise biology-specific funds. Menlo also staffed up its investment team with more technical expertise, Murphy said. Among others, Menlo has tapped early Glean Technologies Inc. engineer Deedy Das, Atlassian's former Chief Product Officer Joff Redfern, and Expanse co-founder Matt Kraning to help with its AI investing strategy. "There are a lot of investors investing in the AI space, but for a fund to have this level of deep technical insights is very refreshing for founders to see," said Carina Hong, founder of Axiom, an AI mathematics startup backed by Menlo. Menlo's biggest challenge will be winning a significant enough slice of companies in competitive rounds to justify the decision to balloon its funds. That task is compounded by soaring valuations and fears that the AI bubble is due to burst. "That's a natural part of any technology cycle," said Ganesan. "The way we mitigate it -- not that we will escape it -- is we stay disciplined on fund sizes and we try to invest in as many of the best companies as we can and concentrate."

Anthropic Investor Menlo Turns 50 and Raises $3 Billion | PYMNTS.com

Menlo Ventures announced the new funding -- its largest raise ever -- Tuesday (June 23) while marking its 50th anniversary and reflecting on its investment in Anthropic. The company said it saw promise in the artificial intelligence (AI) startup even as ChatGPT became a "household name" and many observers claimed the AI race was already over. "We were convinced there was room for another independent foundation model company, that Anthropic was the team to build it, and that an investment in Anthropic could anchor our broader AI strategy," Menlo said in its announcement. A report on the funding from Bloomberg News notes that Menlo has invested $1 billion in Anthropic over the years, though a source familiar with the matter said the company's stake is now worth $14 billion as Anthropic's valuation approaches the trillion-dollar mark. Anthropic and Menlo teamed up in 2024 to launch Anthology, a $100 million fund for AI startups from the seed to expansion stage. In other Anthropic news, the company is preparing to ask some users of its Claude model to verify their identities, something that could require government-issued forms of identification and, in some cases, selfie checks. The policy would cover certain consumer use cases and is designed to prevent abuse, enforce usage rules and meet legal obligations, according to Anthropic's help center. A report on the change from TechCrunch says the new approach reflects a larger tightening of safeguards around AI access as model makers are being pressured to cut down on fraud, underage use and other policy violations. Anthropic said in its support materials that the verification data would be used just to confirm identity and not to train its models. As PYMNTS wrote, the report marks the latest development in a turbulent year for Anthropic. Earlier this month, the startup launched and then suspended access to its latest Mythos and Fable models when the U.S. government raised security concerns about how the foreign governments, companies or individuals could use the technology. President Donald Trump has since said he no longer views Anthropic as a security threat. "The move underscores the growing scrutiny AI providers face as they weigh commercial access against national security and policy risks, and it suggests Anthropic is taking a more cautious approach to customer relationships where sensitive government objections are involved," PYMNTS wrote.