{
  "id": 12056468,
  "title": "Menlo Ventures on AI slowdown; Ola Electric CEO pledges stake",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/05/menlo-ventures-on-ai-slowdown-ola-electric-ceo-pledges-stake",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-10-05T01:52:41.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Economic Times Tech",
    "slug": "economic-times-tech",
    "url": "https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/newsletters/morning-dispatch/menlo-ventures-on-ai-slowdown-listed-startups-investors-cash-out/articleshow/134683599.cms"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Menlo Ventures, a pioneer in backing AI startup Anthropic, contends that the real bottleneck in the technology sector isn't a slowdown in the creation of cutting-edge models, but rather the availability of computational resources. Menlo's co-partners, Matt Murphy and Venky Ganesan, both former investors in Anthropic, argue that the hype around a decrease in frontier model development is misleading. They assert that the models are already intelligent enough to serve current market demands, thereby opening a vast market for all AI enterprises.\n\nMenlo Ventures has previously demonstrated its confidence in Anthropic by spearheading a $750 million funding round, marking the largest investment in the firm's 50-year history. This led to Menlo raising an impressive $3 billion across two new funds in June, the largest corpus ever amassed by the venture capital firm. The AI portfolio of Menlo encompasses a variety of ventures such as Suno, Lovable, Modal, and Town, a work assistant, as well as OpenRouter, which was acquired by Stripe for approximately $7.5 billion. Murphy asserts that there will likely be both enterprise and consumer-focused iterations of these AI assistants, reminiscent of Anthropic's approach to enterprise and OpenAI's consumer-focused model.\n\nOn a separate but related note, Bhavish Aggarwal, the CEO of Ola Electric, has pledged a 4.32% stake in the company to facilitate his subscription to a proposed rights issue. This pledge, documented in a regulatory filing, is solely intended to fund Aggarwal's subscription and does not involve the sale of any shares. This move comes amid a significant decrease in the value of Aggarwal's Ola businesses, as competing electric vehicles and ride-hailing services struggle with falling revenues. Ola Electric's stock price has plummeted, with major investors including SoftBank, Warburg Pincus, Temasek, Tiger Global, and Z47 witnessing a substantial decline in their holdings.",
  "summary": "Happy Monday! Menlo Ventures, an early Anthropic backer, says the real AI constraint is compute, not a slowdown in frontier models. This and more in today's ETtech Morning Dispatch.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 2,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "The Economic Times",
        "title": "Frontier AI slowdown a distraction: Menlo Ventures",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/05/frontier-ai-slowdown-a-distraction-menlo-ventures",
        "published": "2026-10-05T00:30:00.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}