Menlo raises $3 billion as Anthropic bet fuels AI push

Menlo Ventures has turned one early Anthropic gamble into a $3 billion fundraising triumph, but the payoff also underscores a more uncomfortable reality in the AI boom: the biggest venture returns are concentrating around a tiny group of foundation-model companies.

Menlo first invested in Anthropic in 2023, before the startup had a product or revenue, then led its Series D in 2024 with what Menlo later called its largest check ever. The round was widely reported at $750 million and valued Anthropic at about $18.4 billion pre-money. TechCrunch later reported that Menlo’s stake is now worth about $14 billion, citing Bloomberg sources, a mark that helps explain why the firm is suddenly being held up as one of the clearest winners in AI venture capital.

The firm has leaned hard into that result. It said the Anthropic investment became its “flag-planting moment” for going all in on AI, and it structured about $500 million of the 2024 deal through a special purpose vehicle, with another $250 million coming from its own fund and insiders. That kind of concentration is exactly what makes the story so striking: a single foundation-model bet has done as much as years of diversified investing might have done in a more ordinary market.

Menlo and Anthropic then turned the partnership into a broader pipeline with the $100 million Anthology Fund in July 2024. Menlo said Anthropic would provide founders $25,000 in model credits, and CNBC said the effort was modeled on Apple and Kleiner Perkins’ 2008 iFund. By December 2024, Menlo said the fund had backed 18 companies and received thousands of applications worldwide. It now says the fund has backed more than 60 companies and produced three exits, including Graphite and Astrix Security.

On June 23, 2026, Menlo announced $3 billion in new capital across Menlo Ventures XVII, aimed at seed and Series A, and Menlo Inflection IV, focused on Series B and beyond. The firm said the raise is the largest in its 50-year history, a milestone that arrives as Menlo marks its anniversary after being founded in 1976 by H. DuBose Montgomery on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California.

Menlo said it reorganized around AI more than three years ago, after ChatGPT’s launch, and has since invested across AI infrastructure, frontier models, enterprise, healthcare, and consumer applications. The list includes Axiom, Chai Discovery, Goodfire, Neon, OpenRouter, Skild AI, Eve, Higgsfield, Legora, Lovable, Manifest OS, OpenEvidence, Semgrep, Suno and Wispr Flow. That breadth suggests strategy, but the Anthropic windfall suggests something else too: in AI, the biggest venture gains may increasingly belong to the few companies that own the model layer itself.