Sometimes a single bet decides the fate of an entire firm. Venture fund Menlo Ventures has raised 3 billion dollars (around 2.8 billion euros) for a new fund - the largest raise in its 50-year history. Behind that success stands mainly one move: the massive stake in Anthropic, the company that makes the Claude model. Menlo's share in it is now worth around 14 billion dollars, according to sources.

Going back to 2024 reveals how risky the move was. Menlo invested over 500 million dollars in Anthropic, leading the Series D at a moment when the startup's valuation jumped to 18 billion dollars. The bet itself may not have been wild - Anthropic already had a 4-billion deal with Amazon and was founded by former OpenAI researchers. What was wild was how Menlo raised that money: at a time when no one was writing half-billion checks, while giants like SoftBank and Tiger Global were still licking their wounds from the post-pandemic crisis.

Since then, betting on Anthropic has become so fashionable that the company itself warned last month that unauthorized channels supposedly selling its shares are a scam. When a firm has to publicly warn that people are trading its shares in shady places, that's the best indicator of how inflated the bubble around it is.

The Menlo story sounds like a winning one - and it is. But it's worth remembering that every AI euphoria looks genius while it lasts. The funds that got in early now declare themselves visionaries; the question no one wants to ask out loud is what happens to all those who got in later, at inflated valuations, once the music stops.