After betting the company on Anthropic, Menlo Ventures raises a winning $3B fund

Menlo Ventures announced $3 billion in funding on Tuesday, the largest fund raise in its 50-year history, driven in large part by its AI portfolio, particularly Anthropic. Its stake in the model maker is now worth $14 billion, sources told Bloomberg.

To hear the folks at Menlo tell it, they were ignoring it when they made the company’s $750 million bet on Anthropic by 2024, effectively leading the model maker’s Series D.

While the bet itself was not a huge risk, the ways in which the company raised that kind of money was much more.

Menlo was an early investor in Series C, before Anthropic had a product. In 2024, long before Claude Code and Claude Mythos, the company was showing signs of success. It had received a $4 billion deal from Amazon and was heavily pursued by VCs, as it was founded by former OpenAI researchers, including the brothers Manager Dario Amodei and president Daniela Amodei. It was a booming AI company, as many startups founded by OpenAI alums are still around today.

But the way Menlo raised the money was impressive. In 2024, the corporate world was just coming back from a post-pandemic VC winter, with big-money firms like SoftBank and Tiger Global still licking their wounds. No one was writing checks for three-quarters of a billion dollars.

Menlo structured a large portion of the deal, valued at about $500 million, as a special purpose vehicle, or SPV — a one-time investment entity created to pool money from multiple sources in a single deal. Menlo also contributed $250 million from its own fund and contributions from Menlo insiders, sources told Forbes at the time, bringing the total to $750 million.

Since then, AI SPVs have become as commonplace as cockroaches, and Anthropic is a target — so much so that the AI ​​firm issued a warning last month, calling all unauthorized SPVs and secondary markets that sell their stock “scams.”

But for those investors in Menlo’s approved 2024 contract, the aggressive push has paid off handsomely. Menlo went on to invest in the company’s Series E and F rounds.

On top of that, Menlo followed up by launching a $100 million startup fund with Anthropic in 2024, which they aptly named Anthology. That fund has since spent about $250 million, a source with knowledge of the fund told TechCrunch. Not only has it supported 60+ companies (and provided support, such as access to Anthropic leaders and Claude loans), but it has also generated a number of returns already. These include Graphite, acquired by Cursor, and Astrix Security, acquired by Cisco.

This fund has allowed Menlo to get its finger on the pulse of AI startups, categories, and technologies, in the early stages. The VC firm has since built a broad reputation for AI investing, counting AI stars such as OpenRouter, Higgsfield, Legora, Lovable, OpenEvidence, and many others in its portfolio.