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.

Related Crunchbase query:

• Menlo Ventures Portfolio Companies

Related reading:

• Anthropic Nears $1T Valuation And Leapfrogs OpenAI On Unicorn Board With Massive Funding Round

Illustration: Dom Guzman