Menlo Ventures
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Last reviewed
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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. One of the oldest venture firms in Silicon Valley, it has invested at the seed, early, and growth stages across consumer internet, enterprise software, security, fintech, and healthcare, and over the 2020s it reoriented heavily toward generative AI. Its best-known early bets include Uber, Roku, and Siri, the voice assistant that Apple acquired in 2010. In November 2023 the firm closed $1.35 billion in new capital explicitly earmarked for AI and reported $5.6 billion in assets under management. Menlo became one of the most significant financial backers of Anthropic, the maker of the Claude family of models, leading the company's roughly $750 million Series D in early 2024 and joining later rounds. In July 2024 it launched the $100 million Anthology Fund in partnership with Anthropic to seed early-stage AI startups. The firm's AI work is led by partners including Matt Murphy, Tim Tully, Venky Ganesan, 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. 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.
Menlo has raised at least sixteen 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.
The firm's largest single raise came on November 16, 2023, when it closed $1.35 billion in new capital across two flagship vehicles and affiliated funds. Menlo XVI, the flagship fund, targets the seed through Series A stages, while Menlo Inflection III focuses on Series B and beyond. The announcement framed the entire raise around AI, with the firm saying it intended to back the next generation of AI companies. At the time Menlo reported $5.6 billion in assets under management, more than $3.8 billion raised across eight fund groups over its history, and $5.2 billion distributed back to limited partners. Regulatory filings collected by fund-tracking services indicate that a Menlo Ventures XVII vehicle was formed in 2025, though the firm has not publicly announced a size for it.
Menlo's leadership has been careful to frame the AI focus as a tilt rather than a mandate. Managing director Venky Ganesan, discussing the 2023 raise, 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 nonetheless 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. CNBC reported the round valued Anthropic at about $18.4 billion, and Crunchbase News put the pre-money figure near $17.7 billion. 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. 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.
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. Menlo provides all of the capital and economics, while Anthropic contributes technology, research access, and model credits without taking a share of the fund. 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. Press coverage noted that the structure was modeled on the iFund, the 2008 partnership between Apple and Kleiner Perkins that seeded iPhone applications. 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. By the middle of 2025 the partners said they had backed more than 30 Anthology companies, several of which graduated from seed checks to larger lead-stage investments. The fund runs quarterly demo days that have featured Anthropic executives including chief product officer Mike Krieger and president Daniela Amodei.
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. 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 tripled in a single year to about $37 billion, that Anthropic had grown to roughly 40 percent of enterprise LLM spend while OpenAI fell to about 27 percent, and that Anthropic held an estimated 54 percent share of the enterprise coding market, driven largely by Claude Code.
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. 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. 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.
Other AI holdings include the data-curation company Cleanlab, the document-processing company Unstructured, the legal-AI platform Eve, and the non-human-identity security company Astrix. 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. 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. 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.
Taken together, the 2023 AI-focused fundraise, the multi-round Anthropic position, and the Anthology Fund partnership have made a nearly 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.