Menlo Ventures Turns 50 and Announces $3B in Fresh Capital

Menlo Ventures, an early-stage VC firm, marked its 50th anniversary and announced $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.

Menlo Ventures XVII focuses on Seed and Series A investments, backing founders at the earliest stages as they develop breakthrough technologies and establish product-market fit.

Menlo Inflection IV provides growth capital from Series B onward, supporting companies that have emerged as category leaders and are scaling rapidly.

Together, the two funds enable Menlo Ventures to partner with founders across the company-building journey, from inception through growth and scale.

Menlo Ventures' AI Journey.

The firm’s AI strategy gained momentum with an early investment in Anthropic in 2023, backing the company before product launch and meaningful revenue. At a time when many viewed the foundation model race as largely decided, Anthropic’s founding team stood out for its combination of technical expertise and long-term vision.

That investment provided valuable insight into the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem and helped shape a broader investment strategy spanning infrastructure, developer tools, and applications. The firm later led Anthropic’s Series D and launched the Menlo Anthology Fund in 2024, which has since backed dozens of early-stage AI startups.

Today, the portfolio spans companies across the AI stack, from infrastructure and model tooling to enterprise and consumer applications. The collective strength of these investments creates a network effect that helps identify emerging trends, support category-defining founders, and build long-term advantages across the AI ecosystem.

A Team Built for This Moment.

AI founders increasingly seek partners who can contribute beyond capital, offering expertise in technology, product development, talent acquisition, customer growth, and company building. Menlo Ventures has built a team that combines investing experience with deep operating backgrounds across software, infrastructure, and AI.

The investment team includes Tim Tully, former CTO of Splunk; Joff Redfern, former Chief Product Officer of Atlassian and senior product leader at LinkedIn; Matt Kraning, co-founder and former CTO of Expanse; and Deedy Das, a founding engineer and product leader at Glean. Their experience spans AI infrastructure, enterprise software, cybersecurity, robotics, and emerging hardware technologies.

The broader partnership includes Matt Murphy, Amy Wu Martin, JP Sanday, Venky Ganesan, Rama Sekhar, Steve Sloane, Croom Beatty, Shawn Carolan, Greg Yap, and Johnny Hu, whose expertise covers AI-native software, healthcare, fintech, cybersecurity, consumer technology, and life sciences.

Supporting the investment team is a platform organization led by CFO Kirsten Mello and General Counsel Deborah Carrillo, alongside Talent Partner Jordan Ormont, Biz Dev/Corp Dev Partner Houman Haghighi, marketing leader Tiffany Spencer, and network and events lead Kayla Hinderscheid. Together, the team provides support across recruiting, business development, operations, and company building as portfolio companies scale.

The Next Fifty.

A milestone anniversary offers an opportunity to reflect on past successes, but the focus remains firmly on the future. Many of the companies that went on to define entire industries were once overlooked, underestimated, or largely unknown in their earliest days.

With $3 billion in new capital, two flagship funds, and a team built to support founders from inception through scale, Menlo Ventures is positioning itself to back the next generation of category-defining companies and technologies.