Inside Anthology Day: Where AI Founders Meet Anthropic’s Best Minds
A few weeks ago, we held our inaugural Anthology Founder Series event at Anthropic HQ, hosting Anthology portfolio founders from our 20+ companies so far. The day sparked rich discussions on the state of AI, technical breakthroughs, and emerging opportunities, with Anthropic’s team offering deep dives into their latest models and what’s coming next.
When we launched the Anthology Fund, our goal of partnering with Anthropic was twofold: to back the best and brightest entrepreneurs tackling disruptive application and infrastructure challenges and invest at a higher velocity than our traditional fund model allows. We wanted to design a program so compelling that founders would actively seek it out. So far, we’ve done just that—and we’re only getting started.
The early result is a growing community of bold founders tackling hard problems. Since we launched the Anthology Fund with Anthropic nine months ago, we’ve processed many thousands of applications and have backed over 20 startups, including:
- OpenRouter: the go-to LLM model router that processes over two trillion tokens per month;
- Ndea: a frontier AI lab that blends pattern recognition into a unified architecture;
- Mercor: a global hiring platform that helps collect human data labels from around the world;
- All Hands: an open-source coding agent that tops benchmarks like SWE-Bench and MultiSWEBench; and
- Goodfire: a research lab with the goal of understanding how and why AI models behave the way they do.
Most Anthology investments start in the sub-$1.5M range, giving us the opportunity to partner early, identify breakout potential, and double down where we see traction. We’re excited to report that we graduated our first Anthology company to a full $15M investment in the last few weeks—more on that soon. It’s one of the unique advantages of the Anthology program: Founders get proximity to Anthropic and access to a multi-stage capital fund without having to formally fundraise.
Anthology Day: Bringing Our Portfolio Together
Through the Anthology program, our goal is to build a close-knit cohort of companies that not only learn from each other but also collaborate with Anthropic to help shape the future of model development.
Our inaugural Anthology Day featured a series of technical deep dives from the Anthropic team, including:
- A candid Q&A between Mike Krieger, CPO of Anthropic and former founder of Instagram, and Tim Tully, Partner at Menlo Ventures and ex-CTO of Splunk, on what it takes to build iconic startups, lessons from scaling Instagram, and how Anthropic approaches product development;
- An expert guide to using Claude Code to accelerate your startup’s development, with a hands-on demo by Sean Strong on how to use it to build apps;
- An opinionated deep dive from Erik Schluntz on what’s working—and what’s not—when it comes to building effective AI agents, with a view into the future; and
- A talk by Sam Flamini on MCP (Model Context Protocol)—how it originated, what the thought process was, and how it’s become a standard across OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
To cap things off, the Anthropic team surprised our Anthology companies with early access to a special something before it becomes available to the public!
One of our founders summarized it best:
“I get invited to many events and most of them really don’t add much value. I think I took away more technical ideas from three hours here than I have from all my events combined!”
When we asked what idea stood out the most, they said:
“We didn’t have too much luck routing different requests to different models, but until Erik [from Anthropic] mentioned it, I never thought of routing different requests to the same model with different system prompts!”
We’re still accepting applications to Batch 2 of the Anthology Fund to create the next generation of iconic AI companies. Please apply if you’d like to join our community and be a part of events like this in the future!
