Menlo Ventures

Menlo Ventures is a venture capital firm whose AI investments span foundation models, infrastructure and applications. It backs Anthropic and finances the Anthology Fund, a $100 million initiative launched with Anthropic in July 2024. On June 23, 2026, Menlo announced $3 billion in new capital to invest in AI companies across enterprise, healthcare and consumer markets.[7][5]

That AI investment program follows a longer history: Menlo was founded in 1976 and backed companies including Siri, Roku and Uber before its recent AI fund announcements.[6]

Founding partner H. DuBose Montgomery, an electrical engineer coming from Bell Labs, opened the firm on Sand Hill Road in 1976. By November 2023, Menlo reported $5.8 billion under management and a portfolio history encompassing more than 80 public companies and over 165 mergers and acquisitions. Its investment expertise covered consumer, enterprise and healthcare businesses.[7][6]

On November 16, 2023, Menlo announced that it had raised $1.35 billion for Menlo XVI, Menlo Inflection III and affiliated funds, with a mandate to invest in companies leading the AI transformation.[6]

In its June 2026 retrospective, Menlo credited Matt Murphy with leading its first Anthropic investment in 2023, characterizing Anthropic at that point as “pre-product, pre-revenue.” The partnership said it believed there was room for another independent foundation model company and that Anthropic could anchor its broader AI strategy. Menlo said it led Anthropic’s Series D a year later, wrote its largest check to that date, and participated in every subsequent round through the retrospective.[7]

Menlo added Deedy Das as a principal on March 14, 2024, focused on early-stage AI/ML, next-generation infrastructure and enterprise software. Das had moved from founding-team engineer at Glean to engineering manager, then creator and product lead of Glean Assistant. Tim Tully recalled that their early conversations included weeks of Twitter messages debating vector databases, with Das supplying papers and articles to support his arguments. By November 2025, Latent Space described Das as a Menlo partner.[4][1]

Menlo and Anthropic launched Anthology on July 17, 2024. Menlo financed the $100 million initiative and provided venture support; Anthropic offered access to its products and research, including $25,000 in model credits at launch. The announced investment areas included AI infrastructure, industry applications, consumer AI, trust and safety tooling, and technology intended to maximize societal benefits.[5]

An August 13, 2025 update, coauthored by Tim Tully, Deedy Das, Matt Murphy, Derek Xiao and Joff Redfern, described pre-seed investments, lead or supporting checks at Seed and Series A, and investments with strategic benefit to Anthropic. Companies did not have to use Anthropic’s technology if they had relevant strategic alignment. The update advertised $30,000 in Anthropic credits and $100,000 in AWS credits, and described a Q2 Founder Day at Anthropic headquarters featuring Anthropic-led technical talks and agent demonstrations.[8]

Menlo reported more than 30 Anthology companies in August 2025. Its Q2 investments included additional backing and/or led rounds in Goodfire, which builds AI interpretability tools; OpenRouter, a unified interface for LLMs; and Wispr Flow, an AI voice dictation product. By June 23, 2026, Menlo reported more than 60 companies backed. It identified two completed acquisitions—Fintool by Microsoft and Graphite by Cursor—and Cisco’s announced intent to acquire Astrix Security.[8][7]

Menlo also publishes enterprise AI market research. Its December 9, 2025 report, coauthored by Tim Tully, Joff Redfern, Deedy Das and Derek Xiao, combined a survey of 495 U.S. enterprise AI decision-makers conducted November 7–25 with market sizing based on public information, industry reporting and analysis. The survey was conducted with an independent research firm.[9]

Menlo estimated $37 billion in generative AI spending in 2025, including $19 billion on applications. Its scope covered foundation models, model training infrastructure, AI infrastructure and applications; it excluded chips, inference and model serving, and AI features bundled into existing software. The report restated its earlier-year spending estimates to exclude inference, making the cross-year comparison use a consistent scope.[9]

The report estimated Anthropic at 40% and OpenAI at 27% of enterprise LLM spending. These were estimated dollar shares derived from reported production API workload proportions, weighted by application scale and triangulated with available financials. They represented Menlo’s assessment as of December 2025, with a survey limited to U.S. enterprises; Anthropic was also a Menlo portfolio company.[9]

For its fiftieth anniversary in June 2026, Menlo announced $3 billion in new capital, describing it as the largest raise in its history. Menlo Ventures XVII invests from Seed through Series A, while Menlo Inflection IV provides growth capital at Series B and beyond. The announcement’s investment focus extended from infrastructure and frontier models to AI applications in enterprise, healthcare and consumer markets.[7]