Jean-Paul (JP) Sanday

We've known Jake & team since 2022. Their execution has been exceptional and now they're using AI to push beyond access into measurable outcomes & value-based care. This is exactly the kind of company we love to back: mission-driven, category-defining, and just getting started.

Thrilled to announce two well-deserved promotions! 👏 @y2kandace → VP of GTM Talent @samanthasborja → Investor Kandace has been a game-changer for our portfolio since 2022. Sam joined in 2023, hit the ground running, and was just named a @BusinessInsider Rising Star. Congrats to both! 🎉

2026 has been a generational year for us at Menlo already. — Anthropic is the fastest growing company of all time adding $4.5B run rate in 42 days after the $380B round. We put ~$1B into it starting from the Series C — Suno reaches 100M users and $300M ARR — Lovable is the 5th most adopted and 2nd fastest growing AI vendor, going 0 to $200M in a yr — OpenRouter grew 2.5x in 1.5 months. On track to 1 quadrillion token annual run rate. — Higgsfield hits $200M run rate with creative tools and a $1B+ valuation. — Wispr Flow continues to grow 40% MoM with a 70% 1 year retention and wins some massive enterprise contracts — Clerk becomes #4 fastest growing vendor in the league of Google, Atlassian and Replit — Inception launches the first and best reasoning diffusion model that is the fastest for its intelligence at 1000tokens/s — Goodfire, Anthropic's first direct investment, hits $1B+ val and discovers novel biomarkers for Alzheimer's Most VCs don't believe in this model of being picky, low volume investors. We do very few investments (up to 2/partner/yr) and we go early. 5 of these were partnerships since the Seed. It's been working for us so far (even though we've missed a lot too!) It's an privilege to work with founders who run through walls and take on so much risk to bring new things into the world. And we're very lucky to play a small part in that! Still a lot of work to do.

We launched Suno 2 years ago to let the world feel the joy of making music Since then, over 100M people all over the world have used Suno, from music lovers to Grammy winners. We reached a new milestone: 2M paid subscribers, $300M ARR. We are building the entertainment platform of the future. Endless scrolling and passive consumption have flattened culture and reduced people’s taste to a homogeneous, lowest common denominator. People yearn for more, and the future of consumer entertainment is creative. Suno lets everyone actively participate in music culture creation, bringing to life the music that’s inside millions of people. The future is creative entertainment. PS: We’re hiring. If you love the nexus of technology and art, please get in touch: suno.com/careers

👀 Amazing progress at @AnthropicAI : $14B run rate, growing >10x y/y every year since launch. Thrilled to have doubled down in this $30B round and every round since we first invested, making this @MenloVentures largest investment by far in our 50 year history! p.s., this is what enterprise AI leadership looks like! 👇👏🚀

Congratulations to @DarioAmodei and the @AnthropicAI team on raising $30B in Series G! We've believed in your vision since before you even brought a product to market, first investing in May 2023. We're so proud of all the progress and to deepen the partnership. The number of customers spending over $100K annually on Claude has grown 7x in the past year, and the team launched 30+ products and features in January alone. The momentum is incredible 🚀

We raised a $150M Series B at a $1.25B valuation to fundamentally change the field of AI. Scaling is powerful, but we can't intentionally design what we don't understand.

WOW. Did not expect 1,500+ applications for 100 spots at our FDE event. The demand for Forward-Deployed Engineers (FDEs) is absolutely wild. This role has become one of the most sought-after roles in AI. When agents move from demos to real enterprise deployments, great FDEs are the difference between pilots and production. If you know a stellar engineer who would benefit from being in the room tonight LMK. ALSO @Lovable and @AnthropicAI are actively hiring FDEs right now. Comment or DM anyone exceptional! @MenloVentures @antonosika @benjaminvrbk @jozhukennedy

While most sibling or spouse pairs don't work well as founders, @DanielaAmodei and @DarioAmodei have been a dynamic duo and combination. Works well with complementary skills, high trust, low ego, aligned mission! ... Behind @AnthropicAI 's stunning growth is a sibling team that may hold the key to generative AI cnb.cx/4qivwcC

Had the opportunity to discuss the amazing rise of @AnthropicAI and what we saw earlier on in @DarioAmodei and team with @CNBC

We had a great time hosting everyone at @MenloVentures JPM event last night! The vibe at #JPM26 is optimistic and very busy. We're seeing momentum around operational AI (not just theoretical), stronger pipelines, improving margins, and a more confident M&A outlook after a volatile ’25. The industry is buzzing and we're ready for big things in 2026

Menlo Ventures is announcing a $16 million seed investment in @AuroraTher! More than 350 million people worldwide live with over 7,000 rare diseases. Aurora is building the first platform for treating rare genetic mutations that have historically been impossible to address at scale. We’re proud to have incubated Aurora and we’re excited about the team being built. Congratulations to Professors Jennifer Doudna and @UrnovFyodor, and Edward Kaye. Read more from @grgyap and Johnny Hu here: mnlo.vc/building-aurora

We're thrilled to announce Deborah Carrillo has been promoted to Partner at Menlo Ventures 🎉 Deborah has never operated as “just” the general counsel since joining in 2020. Today, her title reflects the impact she's had on Menlo and the companies we back. As Deborah told @meliarobin at @BusinessInsider , giving advice to young lawyers looking to make a move in-house: "Follow people and follow joy." Read more from @venkyganesan here: lnkd.in/gtnaAfne

Menlo Ventures is co-leading @Lovable's $330M Series B with @CapitalG! Lovable’s infrastructure is bigger than many realize: 25M+ projects in a year. 100K+ new projects daily. 500M+ visits to Lovable-built apps in just 6 months. We're betting on Lovable to be a foundational layer in the future of work. Congrats @antonosika, @FabianHedin & team on unlocking this massive unserved market 🚀 Read more from @mmurph @mejoff @samanthasborja: mnlo.vc/lovable-series…

Couldn't be more excited to be partnering with the amazing team @Lovable, led by the dynamic duo of @antonosika @FabianHedin. Turning millions of people into developers and creators day by day!

Amazing round at $5.5B, but more importantly amazing progress in building the business. You rarely see companies at >$200M ARR accelerating growth and @harnessio is! Congrats to @jyotibansalsf and the terrific team that has built a unique platform and set of products for AI software delivery! via @forbes forbes.com/sites/simoneme…

@MenloVentures Enterprise AI report is out. We've done this for 3 years and see the patterns beginning to emerge. AI applications are making their move into scaled AI spend. We are ALL IN on AI to support the great founders working on solving the most interesting problems!

Proud to partner with @eliast and the team at Agency. Working with the team and watching the product grow daily has been a thrill - I can’t wait for everyone to see what they’ve built!

@levie After seeing a bunch of approaches the way I’ve come to think of architecting the system is to imagine I’m telling my 8-year old to perform the tasks. Clearly capable and has enough creativity to figure some things out but needs a lot of context/instructions at different times!

One of the really fun parts of building AI agents is iterating to figure out when something should be handled by the main agent, should be a deterministic tool call, or be a subagent. * Main agent - great for keeping context and state of the overall workflow, but eventually you run into some form of context rot. Yes you can compress the parts that aren’t important later, but the risk is that you lose something useful. * Subagent - great for specific types of knowledge, system prompts, specialized tool use, and specific roles in of a workflow. The benefit here is that you can truly align an agent for a step in a process that can be called at the right time. The downside is the loss of context and finding the right division of agents so you don’t have too many that slow things down. * Tool - obviously necessary and great for anything you want to reliably happen the same way every time or to interact with an external system or data. Of course the more tools the more confused the main or subagent can get on what to use. Even a human with access to multiple conflicting tools will often use the wrong one of the job, so some degree of constraints here is key. In general, a simple heuristic is to try and figure out what a human or set of humans would need to be able to perform the task extremely well, and then trying to implement the essentials of that. But even then it’s not as simple as people come naturally with free context that the agent doesn’t have at all times. So the problem is much more challenging and fun. The cool thing is there’s no free lunch in any AI agent system design. There are tradeoffs in every approach, and you’re basically constantly tweaking the approaches to figure out what actually works for your use-case.

Proud to see @EleosHealth, @evelegalai, and @openrouter recognized on the 2025 #Disruptors60 by Greenfield Partners and live on @TechCrunch, a list celebrating the most groundbreaking AI startups of today. Full list here: disruptors60.ai