Menlo Ventures was announced $3 billion in capital on Tuesday, the biggest raise in its 50-year history, driven largely by its AI portfolio, especially Anthropic. Her stake in the model maker is now worth about $14 billion, sources told Bloomberg.
To hear the folks at Menlo tell it, they balked at it when they made a $750 million investment in Anthropic in 2024, preemptively driving the model maker’s Series D. At that time, that round quadrupled the startup’s valuation to $18.4 billion.
While the gamble itself was arguably not particularly risky, the means by which the company raised this kind of capital was more so.
Menlo was an early investor in the Series C, before Anthropic acquired a product. By 2024, long before Claude Code and Claude Mythos, the company was showing signs of success. It had closed a $4 billion deal from Amazon and was heavily sought after by VCs, having been founded by former OpenAI researchers, including the brothers of CEO Dario Amodei and president Daniela Amodei. It was a rising star AI company, as so many OpenAI alum-founded startups still are today.
But how Menlo raised the money was impressive. In 2024, the venture world is just recovering 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 most of the deal, valued at about $500 million, as a special purpose vehicle, or SPV — a one-time investment entity created to pool money from multiple sources for a single deal. Menlo also contributed $250 million of its own capital and contributions from Menlo sources he told Forbes at the timebringing the total round to $750 million.
Since then, AI SPVs have become as common as cockroaches, specifically targeting Anthropic – so much so that the AI company issued a warning last month, calling all unauthorized SPVs and secondary markets claiming to sell its shares “scams”.
But for those investors in Menlo’s approved 2024 deal, the aggressive push has paid off handsomely. Menlo continued to invest in the The company’s E and F series.
Additionally, Menlo followed up by launching a $100 million startup fund with Anthropic in 2024, which they’ve aptly named Anthology. That fund has soared to close to $250 million in capital raised to date, a source with knowledge of the fund tells TechCrunch. Not only has he backed 60+ companies (and offered them support, such as access to Anthropic leaders and credits for Claude), but he’s already generated quite a few returns. These include Graphite, acquired by Cursor, and Astrix Security, acquired by Cisco.
The fund allowed Menlo to get its finger on the pulse of startups, categories and AI technology from the early stages. The VC firm has since built a broader proxy for AI investing, counting AI stars like OpenRouter, Higgsfield, Legora, Lovable, OpenEvidence and more in its portfolio.
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