Menlo’s Murphy Urges AI Founders to Adapt to Breakneck Growth

Menlo Ventures partner Matt Murphy led Anthropic’s $500 million Series D in 2024, making an unusually concentrated bet on the AI developer before its commercial trajectory was clear. Murphy argues that Anthropic’s advantage now extends beyond the Claude models: products including Claude Code and the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, have helped turn the lab into a broader platform for developers and enterprises. That shift matters because product execution, distribution and ecosystem depth can be as decisive as raw model performance.

In an interview published July 22, 2026, Murphy said Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate surged to $47 billion by May from $9 billion at the end of 2025, a pace he had not seen in 25 years of investing across the internet, mobile and cloud eras. He said founders must adapt to AI companies scaling far faster than conventional startups: launch sooner, iterate from live usage and build talent, capital and infrastructure ahead of demand, while treating platform reach and execution speed as core competitive weapons.