Menlo Ventures
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Menlo Ventures is an American venture capital firm founded in 1976 and headquartered in Menlo Park, California, with an office in San Francisco, making it one of the oldest venture firms in Silicon Valley. In June 2026, while marking its 50th anniversary, the firm closed $3 billion across two AI-focused funds, its largest raise ever, and reported more than $8.5 billion in assets under management. [1][2] Menlo is best known in the AI era as one of the most significant backers of Anthropic, the maker of the Claude family of models: it preemptively led Anthropic's roughly $750 million Series D in early 2024 and added across later rounds, a position reported to be worth nearly $14 billion by mid-2026. [1][2] The firm also runs the $100 million Anthology Fund with Anthropic and publishes the widely cited "State of Generative AI in the Enterprise" report.
Over the 2020s Menlo reoriented heavily toward generative AI after decades of seed, early, and growth-stage investing across consumer internet, enterprise software, security, fintech, and healthcare. Its best-known early bets include Uber, Roku, and Siri, the voice assistant that Apple acquired in 2010. The firm's AI work is led by partners including Matt Murphy, Tim Tully, Venky Ganesan, Shawn Carolan, and Deedy Das.
Menlo Ventures was founded in 1976 by H. DuBose Montgomery, and it takes its name from Menlo Park, the town at the heart of the San Francisco Peninsula venture community. [3] It is among the small group of venture firms that trace their roots to the 1970s and remained active into the 2020s. Across its first decades the firm built a reputation as an early-stage investor in both enterprise and consumer technology, and it ran a healthcare and life-sciences practice as well: in 1987 it incubated Gilead Sciences, the biotechnology company that went public in 1992.
The firm's later reputation rested on a series of early consumer and infrastructure bets. Managing partner Shawn Carolan, who joined in 2002, led Menlo into Siri, where the firm was the first institutional investor and the largest shareholder when Apple bought the company in 2010 for a reported sum above $200 million. Menlo built a large pre-IPO position in Roku, which listed on the Nasdaq in 2017, and it backed Uber, sharing in the ride-hailing company's 2019 public offering. Other notable outcomes include Warby Parker, which went public through a 2021 direct listing, and the connected-camera maker Dropcam, which Google-owned Nest acquired for $555 million in 2014. Portfolio companies were also acquired by Cisco, Google, and Amazon, the last through Amazon's purchase of the pharmacy startup PillPack. By the time of its November 2023 fundraise the firm reported 80 portfolio-company exits, including 15 public listings and 65 acquisitions; by its 2026 fundraise it counted more than 85 public companies and over 170 M&A exits across its history. [1][4]
Menlo has raised at least seventeen flagship venture funds since its founding, with sizes that grew steadily through the 2010s and then jumped in the AI era. Menlo XII closed at $400 million in 2015, Menlo XIV at $450 million in 2017, and Menlo XV at $500 million in October 2020. In July 2022 the firm raised a special opportunities vehicle of about $761 million for later-stage positions.
On November 16, 2023, Menlo closed $1.35 billion in new capital across two flagship vehicles and affiliated funds, framing the entire raise around AI. [4][5] At that time it reported $5.6 billion in assets under management, more than $3.8 billion raised across eight fund groups, and $5.2 billion distributed back to limited partners. [4]
The firm's largest single raise came on June 23, 2026, when, marking its 50th anniversary, Menlo announced $3 billion across two AI-dedicated funds. [1][2] Menlo Ventures XVII, the flagship fund, invests at the seed and Series A stages, while Menlo Inflection IV provides growth capital at Series B and beyond. [2] With the new vehicles the firm reported managing more than $8.5 billion in capital. [1][2] Menlo described AI as a generational platform shift; in the announcement partner Matt Murphy said, "AI is creating one of the largest technology platform shifts we'll see in this lifetime." [2] Managing partner Venky Ganesan added that "strong portfolios attract strong founders," framing the AI book as a compounding advantage in deal flow. [2]
Menlo's leadership has nonetheless been careful to frame the AI focus as a tilt rather than a mandate. Discussing the 2023 raise, Ganesan argued that not every investment has to be an AI investment, and that AI would eventually lose its novelty and become an unremarkable feature of most software. The firm has positioned itself, alongside larger generalist firms such as Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, as one of the venture houses most concentrated on the current AI wave.
Menlo's defining AI relationship is with Anthropic, the developer of Claude and a leading rival to OpenAI. Menlo first invested in Anthropic's $450 million Series C in May 2023, a round led by Spark Capital when Anthropic was still pre-revenue and pre-launch for much of its enterprise business. The firm then took the lead role in Anthropic's next round. Reported beginning in late December 2023 and closed in February 2024, the roughly $750 million Series D was described by The Information as a Menlo-led deal, and reporting at the time noted that a large portion of it was assembled through a special purpose vehicle of about $500 million that Menlo raised from its own limited partners. [6][7] CNBC reported the round valued Anthropic at about $18.4 billion, and Crunchbase News put the pre-money figure near $17.7 billion. [7][8] Managing partner Shawn Carolan has called the more-than-$500 million wager a "bet-the-firm moment." [1]
Menlo continued to back the company as a participating investor in Anthropic's $3.5 billion Series E, announced on March 3, 2025 at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation and led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and it added again in Anthropic's later rounds. [9] Partner Matt Murphy has led Menlo's Anthropic investments, and the firm has publicly described its strategy as continuing to add to the position across rounds. As Anthropic's valuation climbed past $900 billion in 2026, Bloomberg and others reported that Menlo's cumulative Anthropic stake, built across the Series C, D, E, and later rounds, was worth nearly $14 billion, the central driver of the firm's 2026 fundraise. [1][2]
The relationship deepened on July 17, 2024, when Menlo and Anthropic launched the Anthology Fund, a $100 million vehicle to back early-stage AI startups. [10][11] Menlo provides all of the capital and economics, while Anthropic contributes technology, research access, and model credits without taking a share of the fund. [10] The fund invests from the pre-seed through Series A stages, and each backed startup receives $25,000 in credits toward Anthropic's models along with access to the company's products and researchers. [10][11] Press coverage noted that the structure was modeled on the iFund, the 2008 partnership between Apple and Kleiner Perkins that seeded iPhone applications. [11]
Five months after launch, on December 18, 2024, Menlo and Anthropic announced the first cohort of 18 startups, spanning autonomous coding, interpretability research, recruiting software, radiology image analysis, fintech compliance, cybersecurity, and consumer applications. [12] The fund runs demo days that have featured Anthropic executives including chief product officer Mike Krieger and president Daniela Amodei. By mid-2026 the partners reported that the Anthology Fund had deployed roughly $250 million and backed more than 60 companies, with early exits including the AI code-review startup Graphite (acquired by Cursor) and the non-human-identity security company Astrix Security (acquired by Cisco). [1]
Menlo also publishes one of the most cited measures of enterprise AI adoption, its annual State of Generative AI in the Enterprise report. A mid-year update released on August 1, 2025 reported that enterprise spending on large language model providers had reached $8.4 billion and that Anthropic had overtaken OpenAI in enterprise market share. [13] The full-year report, published on December 9, 2025 and drawing on a survey of nearly 500 enterprise decision-makers, found that enterprise AI investment had roughly tripled in a single year to about $37 billion, the fastest category expansion in enterprise software history. [14][15] It reported that Anthropic had grown to about 40 percent of enterprise LLM API spend (up from 12 percent in 2023) while OpenAI fell to about 27 percent and Google climbed to about 21 percent, and that coding and developer tools had become a roughly $4 billion category that Anthropic dominated, led largely by Claude Code; applications captured more than half of all enterprise AI investment, about $19 billion. [14][15]
Beyond Anthropic, Menlo has built a broad portfolio across the layers of the modern AI stack, much of it sourced by Tim Tully on the infrastructure side and by Matt Murphy and Deedy Das on applications. The firm led the $28 million Series A of Pinecone in March 2022, an early bet on the vector database that became a core component of retrieval-augmented AI applications, with Tully joining the company's board. [16] In security, Menlo led the $50 million Series B of Abnormal Security in November 2020; the AI-driven email-defense company went on to reach a $4 billion valuation by 2025. [17] The firm was an early investor in Typeface, the enterprise generative-content startup that raised a $65 million Series A in February 2023 and reached unicorn status later that year. [18]
Other AI holdings include the data-curation company Cleanlab, the document-processing company Unstructured, and the legal-AI platform Eve. The firm has continued to lead new rounds for AI-native startups: in October 2025 it led a $7.1 million seed round for Trove AI, which builds AI agents for private equity workflows. [19] On the data and infrastructure side, Tully's investments include Neon, the serverless Postgres company acquired by Databricks, the observability company Edge Delta, the model-evaluation company TruEra, which was acquired by Snowflake, and RelationalAI.
The table below summarizes notable AI investments, with Menlo's role attributed to the specific round.
| Company | Round / Year | Menlo's role |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | Series C, May 2023 ($450M, led by Spark Capital) | Participating investor |
| Anthropic | Series D, closed February 2024 (about $750M at roughly $18B) | Lead investor |
| Anthropic | Series E, March 2025 ($3.5B at $61.5B post-money, led by Lightspeed) | Participating investor |
| Pinecone | Series A, March 2022 ($28M) | Lead investor |
| Abnormal Security | Series B, November 2020 ($50M) | Lead investor |
| Typeface | Series A, February 2023 ($65M) | Investor |
| Trove AI | Seed, October 2025 ($7.1M) | Lead investor |
Menlo is run by a bench of partners rather than a single dominant figure. Matt Murphy, who joined the firm in 2015, invests multi-stage across SaaS, AI-first applications, developer tools, and robotics, and he authored Menlo's Anthropic investments and co-leads the Anthology Fund. Tim Tully joined as a partner in April 2021 after serving as chief technology officer of Splunk, where he had scaled the product organization and overseen ten acquisitions; at Menlo he focuses on AI, the data stack, and next-generation cloud, with investments including Pinecone, Neon, and Edge Delta. [20] Venky Ganesan, a managing director, concentrates on security and enterprise software and serves as one of the firm's public voices. Shawn Carolan, a managing partner who joined in 2002, built the consumer franchise behind Uber, Roku, Siri, and the neobank Chime. Deedy Das, a partner who was an early member of the enterprise-search company Glean, focuses on AI applications and infrastructure. In June 2023 the firm added Amy Wu Martin, the former head of FTX Ventures, as a New York-based partner focused on consumer technology, gaming, and the creator economy. [21]
Taken together, the 2023 and 2026 AI-focused fundraises, the multi-round Anthropic position, and the Anthology Fund partnership have made a fifty-year-old firm one of the more visible specialist backers of the generative AI wave. Menlo's stated thesis is to identify outlier companies before they are obvious, to back and build category leaders, and to keep supporting them as they scale, a model the firm now applies most aggressively to AI infrastructure, security, and applications built on frontier models.