TLDR:
- Menlo Ventures and Anthropic have partnered to launch a $100m AI fund named Anthology.
- The fund will target AI startups in various areas including AI infrastructure, consumer solutions, trust and safety tooling, and more.
San Francisco-based AI company Anthropic has joined forces with Menlo Ventures to establish a $100m corporate venture capital fund called Anthology. This fund aims to support AI startups from the seed to expansion stage, with a minimum investment of $100,000 per project, drawing on Anthropic’s expertise in AI technology and Menlo’s experience in growing companies.
Founded in 2021, Anthropic is best known for creating the large language model Claude, with the latest version being Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Menlo Ventures is already an investor in Anthropic, which has raised nearly $8bn from major investors like Amazon, Google, Salesforce, SAP, and Zoom.
Following the lead of its competitor, OpenAI, Anthropic launched Anthology to target five key areas that complement its work in AI. These areas include AI infrastructure, new technology applications, consumer solutions, trust and safety tools, and AI technologies that can benefit society.
Corporate investors have played a significant role in supporting AI startups, with over $100bn invested since 2021. While overall AI spending has decreased in recent years, the subset of generative AI, which includes projects like ChatGPT from OpenAI, has continued to attract funding. In fact, data from PitchBook shows that over half of the total AI investments in 2023 involved corporate investors, emphasizing the importance of corporate backing in the AI sector.
