Fifty years ago, Menlo made its first bet on a future that had not yet arrived. In 1976, venture capital was still more craft than industry, but that didn’t stop our founding partner, H. DuBose Montgomery, a 27-year-old electrical engineer fresh from Bell Labs, from opening a new firm on Sand Hill Road. He had a simple belief: The most impactful companies often start building long before the market knows how to value them.
That instinct, backing founders before the opportunity is obvious, has defined every decade since. And it’s exactly what we’re doing today.
As we mark our 50th anniversary, we’re announcing $3 billion in new capital, the largest raise in Menlo’s history, to back the next generation of AI leaders, from infrastructure and frontier models to AI-native applications across enterprise, healthcare, and consumer markets.
Two Funds to Go ALL IN on AI
Our venture fund, Menlo Ventures XVII, invests from Seed to Series A, when a company may still be a small team with technical insight and early signs of product-market pull.
Menlo Inflection IV provides growth capital at Series B and beyond for companies already pulling away from the pack and on their way to becoming the breakout names of the AI era.
Together, these flagship funds let us meet founders where they are and scale with them in every round that follows.
Our AI Journey
Anthropic wasn’t our first AI investment, but it was our flag-planting moment: Menlo was going ALL IN on AI.
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. 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.
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 more time we spent with the team, the more our conviction grew.
A year later, we led Anthropic’s Series D, writing the largest check we’d ever written, and have invested in every round since. In July 2024, we launched the Menlo Anthology Fund in partnership with them, backing early-stage teams building at the frontier. The fund has now backed more than 60 companies—with three exits1—giving us a real-time window into the talent, infrastructure needs, and company-creation patterns shaping the next wave.
From there, Menlo invested across the infrastructure layer with companies including Axiom, Chai Discovery, Gimlet, Goodfire, Neon, OpenRouter, and Skild AI, and expanded into applications as the market matured, through investments in companies including Eve, Higgsfield, Legora, Lovable, Manifest OS, OpenEvidence, Semgrep, Suno, and Wispr Flow.
Together, these companies represent the compounding power of a best-in-class AI portfolio. Every founder we back makes the whole network smarter, and that edge flows to everyone in it. In a market where the best AI founders can choose any investor, proximity to the companies that define their categories is an advantage that capital alone can’t buy. Strong portfolios attract strong founders.
A Team Built for This Moment
AI’s best founders aren’t just looking for capital. They’re looking for partners who can understand the architecture, pressure-test product decisions, recruit deep technical talent, open the right customer doors, and stay useful as a company moves from research insight to product to market.
When the AI moment arrived, Menlo was ready. The firm had been deliberately deepening its technical, product, and operating DNA, bringing in investors who had built and scaled frontier products from the inside. Tim Tully had been CTO of Splunk, where he led product, engineering, IT, and security, and invests today across AI-native software and infrastructure. Former Atlassian CPO Joff Redfern, who previously led LinkedIn’s transition to a mobile company, brings a product-focused lens to investments in the AI-native software layer. Matt Kraning, who holds a Ph.D. in ML from Stanford, co-founded and served as CTO of Expanse before its acquisition by Palo Alto Networks and brings rare firsthand depth across infrastructure, defense, and robotics. Deedy Das helped build Glean from the inside, first as a founding engineer and later as a product leader; he’s focused on AI infrastructure and the emerging hardware layer. Together, they engage founders at the architecture level and on the product decisions that turn great technologies into great companies.
That technical and product depth sits inside a broader partnership with real fluency in the markets AI is reshaping. Matt Murphy led Menlo’s first investment in Anthropic and anchors the firm’s work across AI-native software and infrastructure. Amy Wu Martin was a CFO and executive at Warner Discovery, and brings a consumer lens to the team with a sharp read on how AI will reshape the way people work, create, and connect. JP Sanday invests across AI-native software and digital health. Venky Ganesan and Rama Sekhar anchor the firm’s work in cybersecurity and AI infrastructure. Steve Sloane focuses on AI-native software, supply chain, and automation, and Croom Beatty on fintech and healthcare. Shawn Carolan, a 24-year veteran at the firm, invests across consumer, fintech, and deep tech. Greg Yap and Johnny Hu bring deep sector expertise in bio and healthcare AI, where AI is already reshaping drug discovery, care delivery, and clinical workflows. Johnny, a Gates Cambridge Scholar with a Ph.D. from Harvard, adds deep scientific training to that work.
Behind every deal is a partnership that reaches well beyond the investment team. Our CFO Kirsten Mello and General Counsel Deborah Carrillo enable the firm to move fast while remaining disciplined. And our Fuel Team provides support where founders need it most: Talent Partner Jordan Ormont helps founders recruit the engineers and leaders who turn an early insight into an enduring company, while Houman Haghighi, our Biz Dev/Corp Dev Partner, opens the doors to customers and partners that turn momentum into scale. On the marketing front, Tiffany Spencer helps startups stand out in a crowded market, while Kayla Hinderscheid leads network development and events, building connections across the entire portfolio.
The Next Fifty
While a golden anniversary is a natural moment to look back, we couldn’t be more excited about and focused on the future.
The companies that will define the next era are being built right now. Gilead, Siri, Roku, Uber, and Anthropic were once unknown, underestimated, or misunderstood. Finding companies like them before the market catches up is harder than it’s ever been, so we’ve organized the entire firm around that work. With $3 billion in new capital, two new funds, and a team built to back incredible founders and great companies from the moment they spark, we’re ready to meet the moment.
We’re ALL IN.
- Two acquisitions have been completed; the third has been announced. Fintool, the AI-powered financial analysis startup, was acquired by Microsoft. Graphite, the AI-powered developer productivity platform, was acquired by Cursor. And in May 2026, Cisco announced its intent to acquire Astrix Security. ↩︎
