Menlo’s Investment in Graphite: Code Review for the AI Age

Today we’re excited to announce Menlo Ventures and the Anthology Fund’s investment in Graphite, an AI code review platform that helps engineering teams ship quality code faster.

While AI is accelerating the pace of software development, traditional code review is increasingly becoming a blocker. Developers submit large, monolithic pull requests and wait hours or days for colleagues to manually review them, delaying progress and increasing the risk of errors.

Graphite streamlines this process by offering a platform for stacked pull requests (PRs), allowing developers to break updates into smaller, independent PRs for parallel review and faster feedback. 

This approach forms the foundation for AI in the “outer loop” of software development—including review, testing, and deployment. By structuring changes as stacked PRs, Graphite not only helps developers manage the increased volume of code generated by AI tools, but also powers its own AI-driven automations to help teams focus on building great products instead of getting bogged down in process overhead.

AI-Driven Code Review, Backed by Anthropic

Last year, Graphite partnered with Anthropic to launch Graphite Reviewer, an AI-powered code review assistant that provides real-time, codebase-aware feedback.

Graphite Reviewer summarizes continuous integration (CI) failures, generates PR descriptions for better documentation, and breaks down large code changes into manageable components. When issues are identified, the system automatically generates fix suggestions for developers to implement in a single click, reducing the traditional fix-and-review cycle time.

Graphite Reviewer’s architecture includes sophisticated scaffolding around Claude’s advanced reasoning that encodes Graphite’s deep expertise in code review—including multiple layers of validation like voting, chain of reasoning, and self-critique. It’s a prime example of how we expect tomorrow’s leading application layer AI companies to build on top of Claude’s intelligence to solve domain-specific workflows.

Partnering With a Top-Tier Technical Team

Founders Merrill Lutsky (CEO), Greg Foster (CTO), and Tomas Reimers (Chief Product Officer) are former engineers at Google, Facebook, and Oscar, who have experienced firsthand the inefficiencies of traditional review processes. They built Graphite to bring the same productivity-enhancing workflows used at top-tier engineering organizations to all software teams.

Since its launch, Graphite has seen rapid adoption from companies like Shopify, Ramp, and Notion, who rely on its platform daily to free engineers from the drudgery of time-consuming reviews and spend more time on higher-level system architecture and building.

Investing in the Future of Developer Productivity

At Menlo, we’ve been partnering with category-defining companies in AI and developer tooling for years. Our investments in Anthropic, Harness, Semgrep, Neon, and Unstructured reflect our belief in how AI will shape all aspects of the software development lifecycle.

We are thrilled to support Merrill, Greg, Tomas, and the Graphite team as they build the next generation of AI-accelerated code review. If you’re an engineering leader looking to optimize your team’s development workflows, Graphite is the platform for you.