What Is Menlo's Anthology Fund?

Matt Murphy says Menlo's Anthology Fund was a way to see more of the AI map before it was obvious which companies would matter. After the firm led Anthropic's round, it started the fund in partnership with Anthropic: about $100 million, with checks from roughly $100,000 to about $1 million. The point was a wider aperture across applications and infrastructure when nobody could yet tell what would be big.

The first check was about $100,000 into OpenRouter. He points to a rumored $8 billion acquisition of OpenRouter by Stripe, and he names Whisper, the dictation product he describes at a multi-billion-dollar valuation, and Goodfire among four or five valuable companies from the same strategy. The old rule, that you skip a deal when the valuation or the ownership will not move the needle, would have blocked those checks. He treats the exceptions as a reason Menlo got where it is.