Anthropic leaped to a $47 billion revenue run rate by May, compared to $9 billion in 2025. It’s the kind of growth that Menlo Ventures’ Matt Murphy says he’s never seen in 25 years of investing, not in the internet wave, not in mobile, not in the first cloud boom. Menlo led Anthropic’s $500M Series D, and Murphy has had a front-row seat as the company went from a pre-revenue, pre-launch bet to one of the most valuable startups out there.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Julie Bort talks with Murphy about backing Anthropic before anyone else would, why a great model was never the point, and what’s driving the fastest-growing startups he’s ever seen.
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
0:30 Matt’s relationship with Anthropic post-Series D
3:26 The early Anthropic story: meeting Dario and the team
6:58 Anthropic’s runaway growth: $9B to $47B run rate
7:47 The three-part investment thesis: team, partners, capital
9:07 The real breakthrough: Claude Code, MCP, and Skills as “the harness”
11:41 Proprietary vs. open source
15:52 Addressing the Mythos “marketing stunt” criticism
18:25 The regulation debate and calls for an industry governance board
21:19 Portfolio spotlight: Lovable’s rise from open source to enterprise
25:05 Why AI startups are growing faster than SaaS ever did
30:20 Outro
