Just five months after announcing a new $100 million fund called Anthology Fund, Menlo Ventures and Anthropic have backed their first 18 startups. And they're looking for more.
Menlo said the first 18 candidates were selected from thousands of applicants. This includes startups that develop recruitment software. autonomous coding. Interpretability studies (understanding how models make decisions). Fintech compliance and tax app. Radiology image analysis and chart review app. Cybersecurity of non-human identities. Customer engagement software. and consumer nutrition apps. In addition, eight more people have been accepted into the program and are still operating undercover, Menlo said.
The program is like a combination of a typical corporate startup program (such as Nvidia's Inception or Microsoft for Startups), where startups get usage credits and educational resources, and an incubator, where they get attention and investment to build their companies. . The fund will write checks of $100,000 or more to startups from pre-seed to Series B, and will provide credits worth $25,000 to Anthropic's models.
Menlo is a major backer of Anthropic, and the fund will focus on the next big thing in AI coming in 2025: moving beyond basic models and AI infrastructure to new apps that run on top of them. We will support you.
“We are one of the largest investors in Anthropic and a big fan of what they are doing,” Menlo Ventures partner Tim Tully told TechCrunch in July when the program launched. “We thought this was an opportunity to do something together, where we could look at the ecosystem and find great companies that are building Anthropic or AI more broadly.”
