MENLO PARK, Calif., June 23, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Menlo Ventures today announced $3 billion in new capital to back promising AI companies at every stage, across the AI stack, from infrastructure and frontier technologies to AI-native applications in enterprise, healthcare, and consumer markets.
Menlo Ventures XVII, the firm’s flagship venture fund, invests in seed and Series A rounds, while Menlo Inflection IV provides growth capital to companies scaling rapidly at Series B and beyond.
“AI is creating one of the largest technology platform shifts we’ll see in this lifetime,” said Matt Murphy, Partner at Menlo Ventures. “What makes this moment unique is the speed and breadth of the change. But it’s still very early—incredibly early—and many of the defining AI companies of the next decade have yet to be built. These funds give us the capital and flexibility to partner with founders from company formation through hypergrowth.”
A VC Firm Built for the AI Era
More than three years ago, Menlo made a deliberate decision to reorganize around AI. The firm recognized ChatGPT’s launch as the beginning of a massive platform shift that would reshape the entire technology stack and global economy. While much of the market was still assessing the implications of generative AI, Menlo began assembling the team and defining the strategy to meet the moment: recruiting investors with deep technical, product, and operating expertise, conducting primary research on the uses of AI, and investing across the AI stack.
That strategy informed the firm’s investing, beginning with Anthropic. Menlo first invested in Anthropic in 2023, when the company was pre-product and pre-revenue, and many believed the foundation model market had already been decided. However, the firm believed there was room for another independent foundation model company and saw Anthropic as an early anchor for a broader AI strategy. A year later, Menlo Ventures led the Series D and, that summer, launched the Anthology Fund, an AI innovation fund, in partnership with Anthropic, giving Menlo early access to emerging ideas, talented AI innovators, and critical infrastructure defining the forefront of AI.
From there, Menlo invested across the infrastructure layer with companies including Axiom, Chai Discovery, Goodfire, Neon, OpenRouter, and Skild AI, and expanded into applications as the market matured through investments in companies including Eve, Higgsfield, Legora, Lovable, Manifest OS, OpenEvidence, Semgrep, Suno, and Wispr Flow.
“Strong portfolios attract strong founders. That’s the compounding power of a best-in-class AI portfolio,” said Venky Ganesan, Partner at Menlo Ventures. “Every company we back makes the whole network smarter, and that edge flows to every founder in the portfolio. In today’s market, the best AI founders have their choice of investors; being close to the companies defining the category is an advantage capital alone can’t buy.”
Fifty Years of Being Early
For fifty years, Menlo has understood the gravitational pull of new technology waves before others did, moving early to back the foundational companies that would define each era. The firm incubated Gilead Sciences before biotech became a defining sector of modern healthcare, backed Siri years before voice became a mainstream interface, backed Hotmail, one of the first free web apps to prove that consumer products could build massive audiences on the internet, funded Roku before streaming reshaped entertainment, led an early round in Uber when it was unclear whether ridesharing could scale beyond black cars in San Francisco, and backed Anthropic before it had a product in market.
Menlo Ventures’ early conviction around AI, deep technical expertise and industry knowledge, and portfolio depth have positioned it as a leading voice in the space.
“Being early has always been part of Menlo’s DNA,” said Shawn Carolan, Partner at Menlo Ventures. “The biggest success stories never look obvious at the outset. To be a good early-stage investor, you have to imagine a market before it exists, understand how technology solves the pain, and help founders build toward it. We embrace first principles. The approach roots our conviction in identifying outlier opportunities before their potential becomes obvious.”
For more details, visit https://mnlo.vc/3b-for-ai.
About Menlo Ventures
Menlo Ventures is a leading early-stage venture capital firm investing at the forefront of AI. Our portfolio includes more than 85 public companies and over 170 exits through mergers and acquisitions. Currently managing more than $8.5 billion in capital, we invest at every stage across consumer, enterprise, and healthcare. Our portfolio companies include Abnormal AI, Anthropic, Axiom, Carta, Chai Discovery, Chime, Harness, Lovable, OpenEvidence, Poshmark, Recursion, Roku, Rover, Siri, Suno, and Uber. We strive to have a positive impact on everything we do. When we’re in, we’re ALL IN, and we are ALL IN on AI.
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@MenloVentures
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