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Menlo Ventures announced<\/a> $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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Series D. At the time, that round quadrupled the startup\u2019s valuation to $18.4 billion<\/a>.<\/p>\n While the bet itself was arguably not wildly risky, the means by which the firm raised that kind of capital was more so.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Menlo structured the bulk of deal, about $500 million worth, as a special purpose vehicle, or SPV \u2014 a one-off investment entity created to pool money from multiple sources for a single deal. Menlo also contributed $250 million from its own fund and contributions from Menlo insiders, sources told Forbes at the time<\/a>, bringing the total round to $750 million.<\/p>\n Since then, AI SPVs have become as commonplace<\/a> as cockroaches, with Anthropic a particular target<\/a> \u2014 so much so that the AI company issued a warning last month<\/a>, calling all unauthorized SPVs and secondary markets claiming to sell its stock \u201cscams.\u201d<\/p>\n But for those investors in Menlo\u2019s authorized 2024 deal, the aggressive push paid off handsomely. Menlo went on to invest in the company\u2019s Series E and F<\/a>.<\/p>\n On top of that, Menlo followed up by launching a $100 million startup fund with Anthropic in 2024<\/a>, which they cutely named Anthology. That fund has since ballooned into capital deployed to date closer to $250 million, a source with knowledge of the fund tells TechCrunch. It has not only backed 60+ companies (and offered them support, like access to Anthropic leaders and credits for Claude), but has also produced a number of returns already. These include Graphite, acquired by Cursor, and Astrix Security, acquired by Cisco.<\/p>\n The fund has allowed Menlo to get its finger of the pulse of AI startups, categories, and tech, at the earliest stages. The VC firm has since built a broader rep for AI investing, counting AI stars like OpenRouter<\/a>, Higgsfield,<\/a> Legora<\/a>, Lovable<\/a>, OpenEvidence<\/a>, and many others in its portfolio.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n