After betting the firm on Anthropic, Menlo Ventures raises victorious $3B fund

Menlo Ventures announced $3 billion in funds on Tuesday, the largest raise in its 50-year history, driven in large part by its AI portfolio, especially Anthropic. Its stake in the model maker is now worth about $14 billion, sources told Bloomberg . To hear the folks at Menlo talk about it, they were white-knuckling it when they made a bet-the-firm $750 million investment in Anthropic in 2024, preemptively leading the model maker’s Series D. At the time, that round quadrupled the startup’s valuation to $18.4 billion . While the bet itself was arguably not wildly risky, the means by which the firm raised that kind of capital was more so. Menlo had been an early investor, before Anthropic had a product. By 2024, long before Claude Code and Claude Mythos, the company was showing signs of success. It had landed a $4 billion deal from Amazon , and was being hotly pursued by VCs, having been founded by former OpenAI researchers, including siblings CEO Dario Amodei and president Daniela Amodei. It was a rising-star AI company, as so many startups founded by OpenAI alum still are today . But how Menlo raised the funds was eye popping. In 2024, the venture world was just rebounding from the 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. …