Menlo Ventures

• 1. Introduction

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  Menlo Ventures was there when a scrappy ride-hailing startup called Uber needed someone to lead its series B financing. That was in 2011, years before Uber's IPO became one of the largest liquidity events for a U.S. venture-backed technology company. The firm had also backed Siri before Apple came calling in 2010, and had incubated a little biotech company called Gilead Sciences back in 1987, decades before Gilead became a household name. By the time Menlo celebrated its position as one of Silicon Valley's oldest active venture firms, it had quietly threaded through some of the most consequential technology bets of the past half century. How did a firm founded in 1976 stay relevant through every technology cycle that followed? What does its portfolio reveal about how Silicon Valley actually works, behind the headline announcements and the IPO filings?

• 2. Deep Roots in Silicon Valley

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  H. DuBose Montgomery founded Menlo Ventures in 1976, establishing the firm in Menlo Park, California, in the heart of what would become the global center of technology investment. Technology press accounts have described Menlo as one of the oldest venture firms still active into the 2020s, a distinction that relatively few of its peers from that era can claim. The firm takes its name from the town where it set down roots, and the National Venture Capital Association listed a San Francisco address for the firm in its member directory alongside its Menlo Park base.

  For most of its early decades, Menlo focused primarily on enterprise companies, the kind of software and infrastructure businesses that serve other businesses rather than individual consumers. By the 2010s, that orientation had shifted toward a more balanced mix. Consumer technology, healthcare, and life sciences joined enterprise software as equal priorities. The shift reflected not just changing markets but a deliberate generational transition within the firm itself. In 2015, Menlo closed its twelfth fund, Menlo Ventures XII, at $400 million, after reducing the number of active partners as a new generation of leadership took hold.

• 3. The Gilead Gamble

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  Axios reported in 2023 that Menlo incubated Gilead Sciences in 1987, a relationship that predates almost every familiar chapter in Gilead's story. Gilead Sciences raised $86.25 million in a 1992 initial public offering, according to VentureBeat, and went on to become one of the most valuable pharmaceutical companies in the world. What Menlo chose to do with that relationship afterward is telling: after the Gilead success, the firm stepped away from life-sciences investing entirely for about two decades.

  The practice lay dormant until 2017, when Menlo revived it by hiring Greg Yap to lead the effort. The gap between those two periods spans roughly twenty years of biomedical breakthroughs, genomics advances, and pharmaceutical transformations that Menlo sat out by choice. By 2020, TechCrunch reported that Menlo expected part of its fifteenth fund to flow toward digital health, data-heavy biotechnology, and platform therapeutics companies. The firm's return to life sciences came with a sharper thesis than the original incubation work.

• 4. Building the Fund Stack

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  In 2017, Menlo raised Menlo Ventures XIV at $450 million, targeting consumer, enterprise, and what the firm called "frontier technologies." Forbes reported that Menlo used proprietary software and startup operating data as part of its investment process for that fund, an approach that tried to bring systematic analysis to an industry historically dominated by intuition and personal networks. Two years later, in 2019, Menlo announced a separate $500 million vehicle called the Inflection Fund, aimed specifically at companies at the early-growth stage.

  Menlo XV, another $500 million early-stage fund, closed in October 2020. Then in January 2023, Axios reported, based on regulatory filings, that Menlo was raising at least $500 million for a sixteenth fund, $100 million for a life-sciences fund, and $100 million for an incubation fund. By November 2023, TechCrunch reported that those efforts had closed at $1.35 billion in new capital across Menlo XVI, Menlo Inflection III, and affiliated funds combined. That same report placed the firm's total assets under management at $5.6 billion, with more than $3.8 billion raised across eight distinct fund groups over its history.

• 5. A Portfolio of Pivots

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  Siri's story with Menlo illustrates how the firm worked at its most active. MacRumors reported that Menlo managing director Shawn Carolan served as a Siri board member and investor after Siri's 2008 series A financing. Apple acquired Siri in 2010, two years after that financing round. The firm's involvement was not passive capital; a managing director was sitting on the board, shaping the company's direction before Apple arrived.

  The Dropcam exit followed a similar pattern. TechCrunch and the Silicon Valley Business Journal both reported Dropcam as a Menlo portfolio company. GeekWire reported that Google-owned Nest acquired Dropcam for $555 million in 2014. Warby Parker, the eyewear company that appeared in the Menlo XI portfolio, went public through a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021, according to Axios. Roku, which Menlo backed before its IPO filing, listed on the Nasdaq in 2017. By 2023, TechCrunch reported that Menlo had recorded 80 portfolio-company exits in total: 15 public companies and 65 acquisitions.

• 6. Anthropic and the AI Bet

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  In April 2018, Recode reported that Menlo made its first major cryptocurrency-related investment by joining a $40 million financing round for BitPay, the payments company. That move reflected an appetite for frontier technology bets that the firm had already written into its fund mandate. The bigger signal of where Menlo was heading came with its investment in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence safety company.

  In July 2024, Menlo and Anthropic jointly launched the Anthology Fund, a $100 million initiative targeting pre-seed, seed, and series A artificial-intelligence companies. CNBC described the Anthology Fund as an early-stage vehicle backed by both companies and structured to encourage startups to build with Anthropic technology. For Menlo, the Anthology Fund represents a move beyond passive investment into active ecosystem construction, using its capital and its portfolio company relationships to pull new AI ventures into a connected orbit.