Menlo Ventures

It's flowing.

On the very same day, Basecamp Research, which builds biology models, announced a $140 million Series C, and its backers include the Anthology fund that Anthropic runs alongside Menlo Ventures, plus NVIDIA.

The whole field is racing toward agents doing real discovery work.

I do wanna raise one more concern because biology is the domain where people worry most about AI capabilities being misused.

My colleague Dakin Campbell spoke with him, and we're gonna unpack that conversation.

We're also bringing on Menlo Ventures to discuss some new data they've collected on consumer AI.

We're gonna close out the show with a conversation about The Information's newly released of the 50 most influential people in the tech sector.

It's gonna be a great show, so let's get right on into it.

He also has some comments on the AI trade itself, which I will let listeners read for themselves.

Uh, that is Dakin Campbell, our AI finance reporter here at The Information.

Menlo Ventures released a new report on the state of consumer AI.

There are some interesting findings in that study.

Just on your, on your thing.

You know, Alex Kerlen just left to go to Menlo Ventures, right, from there.

Yeah.

He was on the board of Owner with me.

Um, it's actually where, um, Kareem, my co-founder, and I met.

We were both Menlo Fellows, so really credit, um, credit Menlo Ventures with bringing us together.

And the, the fellowship was really a, um, a, a, a way for, um, 100 or so exited founders, people who were thinking about what was next, looking to solve, um, the next problems, to come together in a, in a curated way with Menlo Ventures to really explore the, the problem space.

So we, um, we, we met.

We both, um, we both talked about our experiences selling into the healthcare vertical and talked about, um, solving these problems.

So, um, great, great group of people.

Um, you know, highest respect for, uh, the investors at Menlo Ventures and, and really, uh, think, um, they're doing a- amazing work there.

Jeff, a- amazing work that you're doing with companies in the healthcare space that are trying to reach their customers, uh, trying to do so in an efficient way with their sales and growth teams.

There's amazing companies like a bridge who is deployed in over, I think, 300 health systems as we speak and growing like crazy.

And this is the first time, actually, Menlo Ventures put out a really cool report at the beginning of the year that healthcare was adopting, was deploying, excuse me, deploying AI to faster than anywhere else in the economy.

This is a first.

This is a first in history.

The new financing comes just three months after Mecca announced that it raised $60 million in a round led by Framework Ventures.

That included participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures.

Mecha AI was founded back in 2024 by four entrepreneurs who do not have backgrounds in robotics.

But they did recognize that there was a dearth of physical world data and realized that capturing real-world interactions was the primary bottleneck holding back general-purpose robots, including humanoids.

A single company can be a $10 billion plus company.

Amy Martin is an investor at Menlo Ventures, a longstanding venture capital firm that has backed companies ranging from Anthropic to Uber to fintechs like Betterment.

In 2024, it also invested in Slingshot, the company behind Ash.

Overall, Slingshot says it's raised about $93 million.

Welcome, everyone.

I'm Unity Stokes, co-founder of StartUp Health, and I am excited to welcome Greg Yap, partner at Menlo Ventures.

to today's fireside chat.

Menlo, as many of you probably already know, is one of the world's leading VCs.