Menlo Ventures Stands to Turn $1 Billion Into $25 Billion on Anthropic IPO

Menlo Ventures' estimated $1 billion stake in Anthropic could be worth around $25 billion if the AI lab's IPO lands at a $2 trillion valuation, and partner Matt Murphy says he isn't worried about a thing.

Murphy, an early Anthropic investor, sat down with Business Insider's Ben Bergman at the Tech Insider: Growth Mode town hall during SF Tech Week in San Francisco. Menlo has invested in every Anthropic round since 2023, making it one of the biggest potential winners of the listing.

What about those $8 billion in losses?

Murphy shrugged off leaked financials obtained by Reuters showing Anthropic racked up $8 billion in operating losses last year. He told the audience to wait for the company's S-1 filing before judging the business.

"If I could buy more, I would," Murphy said.

He also pushed back on the argument that Chinese open-weight models are about to commoditize the biggest AI labs. His case: the market has moved past experimentation and into optimization. Companies now focus on cutting costs, post-training models, and routing work to the right system.

Menlo is betting heavily on that infrastructure layer — compute, inference, routing, and optimization. Murphy said it accounts for roughly 60% to 70% of the firm's AI investments.

Is there a next Anthropic?

No, according to Murphy. "I don't think there's going to be another Anthropic," he said bluntly.

That doesn't mean he sees no froth. He called neo-labs and robotics "super interesting" but warned that some startups are raising $100 million or even billion-dollar rounds before showing much real traction.

In a lightning round, Murphy took a swing at Anthropic's biggest rival. Asked which company was most overhyped right now, he answered without hesitation: "Definitely OpenAI," he said with a grin.

Who disagrees with the bulls?

The Tech Insider audience of investors and founders was cooler on Anthropic than Murphy. When Bergman asked how many people would invest at a $3 trillion valuation, the response was tepid — most said they would not buy Anthropic stock at that price.

The head of Washington University's endowment, speaking last month at a conference of chief investment officers in Fort Worth, Texas, warned that AI labs are in major trouble because of competition from Chinese models.

"When we looked at the original OpenAI deal that some of our peers participated in and made tons of money on paper, we were skeptical," the endowment head, Wilson, said. "I've gotten more skeptical over time."

Early OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla told Bergman he strongly disagrees with Wilson, arguing that OpenAI and Anthropic hold a huge cost advantage in chips and data centers.

Business Insider's Katie Roof reports that most investors remain highly bullish on American AI, particularly the largest players, but many privately voice skepticism about ballooning valuations across the broader ecosystem.

What else moved the VC world?

• $100 million in compute for the White House. Katie Roof and Politico reported that VC Anjney Midha's new endeavor, National Compute, gifted $100 million in compute power to the White House's Genesis Mission program for AI researchers, plus another $100 million for public sector employees.
• An invite-only late-stage club. Get Access came out of beta last week, letting personal investors into select later-stage rounds. Guy Oseary — Madonna's manager and Sound Ventures cofounder — led an investment into the startup.
• A new VC with a story. Noa Argamani, an October 7 survivor who spent 246 days in Hamas captivity, is joining Israel-focused fund Vine Ventures.
• Concerts as an AI hedge. "Real life experiences are the ultimate hedge against AI," said Paul Martino, managing partner at Bullpen Capital. "The place you're going to escape from AI is a concert."
• Drama at a $5 billion startup. Corgi, the $5 billion AI insurance company known for its San Francisco cafés and "Corgi girls," is dealing with internal drama.
• Bill Gates turns darker on AI. Speaking on Ezra Klein's podcast last week, Gates said AI "makes nuclear weapons look like nothing," after going public with blunt AI jobs warnings in August.

Meanwhile, in Europe

At Munich's Bits & Pretzels conference, Legora CEO Max Junestrand made the case for building legal AI in Stockholm. European employees stick around more, he said, while San Francisco has a "very mercenary culture" where people "go and do one year in lots of AI companies." Still, Legora's dual HQ is now in New York, closer to its American customers.

One investor at the event lamented that Hugging Face and Listen Labs — both started in the US by founders with European roots — hadn't been built locally and sold to Nvidia and Salesforce instead. Few in Germany's ecosystem share that dream: the conference's most anticipated event was San Francisco Tech Week itself.

The split is stark — insiders like Murphy are doubling down while endowment chiefs grow more skeptical, and where Anthropic's S-1 lands will tell us who was right.