Menlo Ventures

Exciting news: I'm doubling down on knowledge research and AI products as Chief Scientist! Ash Ashutosh is joining Pinecone as our new CEO! Here is what I posted on our blog just now: I'm thrilled to share that Ash Ashutosh is joining Pinecone as our new CEO! Ash is an accomplished entrepreneur and tech veteran. He will grow the company and expand Pinecone’s leadership in the vector database space. I will become the company’s Chief Scientist and drive forward our mission: to make AI knowledgeable. Ash is a three-time founder of storage and data infrastructure companies Serano Systems, AppIQ, and Actifio, leading those to hundreds of millions in annual revenues and eventual acquisitions. His 40-year journey in technology also includes time spent as the CTO of HP’s storage division, a partner at VC firm Greylock, and most recently, Global Director of Solution Sales at Google. He holds a degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in computer science from Penn State University. It was not easy to find a leader like Ash who fits our culture, deeply understands cloud infrastructure, and has the operational track record of successfully growing companies. Over the last several months, I spent many hours with Ash talking about technology, strategy, our market and vision, and what kind of company we want Pinecone to be. I could not have hoped for a better person than Ash to partner with me on growing Pinecone. As for myself, I’ll focus my energy on the critical and urgent effort to unlock the next phase of our technology, pushing the boundary of knowledgeable AI and search, and building delightful and context-aware products and infrastructure. We are at a pivotal moment. The convergence of AI and data represents the defining technology transition of our lifetime. The potential value for our customers is limitless, both through leveraging AI models to revolutionize search, and by using search to enrich the context for AI. This powerful intersection is precisely where Pinecone thrives. This is where I will dig deep as Chief Scientist. On a personal note, for those who know me, you can guess how excited I am to be spending more time with data and models, coding and prototyping, and understanding the tooling and ecosystem better. To the Pinecone team, my 46th birthday was this weekend. My 7yo daughter gave me the best birthday wish ever: “Dad, I hope you have a fun year at Pinecone and work with nice and helpful people.” She nailed it. Thank you all for being “nice and helpful.” Building Pinecone with you is a ton of fun, you rock! I want to take the opportunity to also thank our loyal customers and users. Thank you for loving our product and trusting us with your production workloads. There is sooo much more coming! I can’t wait to spend more time with you, learn from you, and build for you. Nano-banana made "Ash and me" engage in a vivid conversation. I sure would love to know what they are talking about : )

Congratulations to the Anthropic team on this incredible Series F raise! Their rise has been nothing short of historic: crossing $4.5B ARR this summer, serving 300K+ business customers worldwide, and now announcing a $13B Series F at a $183B valuation. When we first invested in 2023 (Series C), the company was pre-product and pre-revenue, but we believed in the incredible DNA of the founding team and the differentiation of their model. CEO Dario Amodei had led OpenAI’s GPT-2 and GPT-3 projects, and many of Anthropic’s founders were key contributors to those groundbreaking models. We anticipated two large independent winners would emerge in this space and Anthropic was destined to be one. From there our conviction grew. We led their Series D (early ramp) and continued to invest significantly through their Series E (epic ramp), and now their Series F (hyper scaling). Anthropic represents the largest single investment in Menlo’s history, and we couldn’t be happier. As investors–and also partners on the $100 million Anthology Fund–we've had the privilege of watching them push the boundaries of AI model performance, functionality, and safety. Today, they are a dominant force in the industry, as thousands of developers and Fortune 500 companies choose to standardize on Claude. It’s been a rapid ascent: Two years ago, OpenAI dominated the enterprise market, but in July our Mid-Year LLM Market Update revealed that Anthropic had overtaken OpenAI in the enterprise market (Anthropic enjoys a 32% share vs. 25% for OpenAI). The most exciting thing is how far they've come in a relatively short period of time, especially given how quickly this market moves and how enormous it has become. This isn't just a funding milestone, it’s a pivotal moment for the AI ecosystem and the tech market in general. Anthropic's models, commitment to trust and safety, and maniacal focus on developer experience continue to set the standard for the industry. We're proud to continue supporting Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, and the incredible Anthropic team in the next chapter of this amazing journey.

🚀 Today, we launch Aurasell: the world’s first AI-Native CRM Platform and announce our $30M seed round! For 25 years, legacy CRM frameworks have promised productivity but delivered admin work: 🤯 B2B sellers spend less than 30% of their time actually selling. 🤯 Bolt-on bloat and tool sprawl kills productivity while SaaS fees skyrocket. 🤯 Data silos, overlapping workflows, and broken customer journeys plague operations. Today, everything changes! We’ve built the first AI-Native CRM Platform — 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘤𝘩, 𝘱𝘭𝘶𝘨𝘪𝘯, 𝘥𝘢𝘴𝘩𝘣𝘰𝘢𝘳𝘥, 𝘰𝘳 𝘤𝘰-𝘱𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘵. 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁. 𝗢𝗻𝗲 𝗚𝗧𝗠 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺. 𝗧𝗼𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗹. Our mission is simple: - Give sellers their time back to focus on human-to-human selling. - Save companies up to 50% on SaaS costs through tool consolidation. - Make every rep a rockstar maximizing productivity. This isn’t just a launch day for a product. It’s the rewriting of how go-to-market teams work — intelligent automation and agentic workflows, seamlessly executed with human connection. We’re proudly backed by Next47, Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures #AINativeCRM #Aurasell #AI #StealthToLaunch #GoToMarket