After betting the firm on Anthropic, Menlo Ventures raises victorious $3B fund
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Menlo Ventures announced $3 billion in fresh capital on Tuesday, the largest fund raise in the firm's 50-year history.
- Menlo's Anthropic stake is now worth about $14 billion, per sources cited by Bloomberg.
- Menlo led Anthropic's $750 million Series D in 2024 at an $18.4 billion valuation, structuring roughly $500 million of the round as an SPV and contributing $250 million from its own fund and insiders.
- Anthropic issued a warning last month calling unauthorized SPVs and secondary-market sales claiming to sell its stock "scams."
- The Anthology fund Menlo launched with Anthropic in 2024 has grown from $100 million to roughly $250 million deployed across more than 60 startups.
- Anthology exits include Graphite, acquired by Cursor, and Astrix Security, acquired by Cisco.
- Menlo has expanded its AI portfolio with bets on OpenRouter, Higgsfield, Legora, Lovable, and OpenEvidence.
Why it matters: A $750 million 2024 bet is now worth roughly $14 billion on paper — a return that single-handedly justifies Menlo's largest-ever fund and validates the controversial SPV structure used to raise it during the VC winter. Limited partners in the new $3 billion vehicle are implicitly betting that Anthropic's valuation keeps climbing, concentrating enormous fund-cycle risk in a single position.
