Menlo Ventures Portfolio Performance in Early 2026

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.