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Happy Monday! Menlo Ventures, an early backer of Anthropic, says that the real constraint in AI development is compute power, not a slowdown in frontier models. Menlo's partner Matt Murphy, who led the firm's Anthropic investments, described the slowdown as a "red herring." The frontier AI models are already intelligent enough to serve the current market and present an enormous opportunity for all AI companies, Murphy told ET.

Menlo Ventures also recently invested heavily in Anthropic, leading a $750 million funding round that valued the company at $18.4 billion. This substantial investment increased Menlo's stake to nearly $14 billion by June, resulting in the largest cheque in the firm's history. Menlo has since raised $3 billion across two new funds, the largest corpus in its 50-year history.

AI portfolio: Menlo's other AI investments include Suno, Lovable, Modal, and the work assistant Town. The firm also backed OpenRouter, which was acquired by Stripe for approximately $7.5 billion. Menlo believes that Anthropic has paved the way for enterprise and consumer-focused AI assistants, similar to how Anthropic broke into enterprise markets and OpenAI captured the consumer segment.

On the other hand, Menlo's partners noted that the market is experiencing a mix of growth and high valuations. Some companies are achieving rapid revenue growth, going from zero to $1 billion in just 18 months, while smaller startups command billion-dollar valuations. Bhavish Aggarwal, founder and CEO of Ola Electric, pledged a 4.32% stake in the company to fund his participation in a proposed rights issue.