Anthropic hits $47B revenue run rate; Menlo Ventures' Murphy sees fastest startup growth in 25 years

In a TechCrunch Equity podcast episode, Menlo Ventures partner Matt Murphy discussed his firm's early backing of Anthropic and the remarkable growth the company has achieved. Murphy led Menlo's $500M Series D investment in Anthropic and has observed the company's trajectory from a pre-revenue, pre-launch venture to one of the most valuable private startups operating today.

Anthropicreached a $47 billion（約7.5兆円） revenue run rate by May, compared to a $9 billion（約1.4兆円） run rate in 2025. Murphy emphasized that this growth curve is the fastest he has witnessed across his 25 years of investing—a period that encompasses the internet wave, the mobile boom, and the first major cloud infrastructure cycle. He noted that the deal structure itself posed a challenge, as Anthropic did not fit neatly into any of Menlo's existing fund mandates at the time of investment, yet early signals—including investment from Google and Amazon—validated the thesis.

A key point Murphy stressed is that Anthropic's underlying language model was never intended to be the company's primary defensible advantage. Instead, Anthropic built a platform by layering additional products and capabilities around Claude: Claude Code for software development, MCP for system integration, and Claude Skills for specialized task execution. This transition from a model-centric company to a broad platform unlocked the speed and scale Murphy now observes.

Murphy also touched on other AI startups he is monitoring, including Lovable and Legora, which he described as growing faster than any startups he has seen in his 25-year career. He used these examples to illustrate how the competitive landscape for AI founders has fundamentally changed, requiring not just a strong foundation model but a comprehensive ecosystem of tools and integrations to capture market share and drive adoption at scale.

Anthropic's acceleration to a $47 billion（約7.5兆円） revenue run rate by May represents a departure from historical startup scaling patterns. Matt Murphy's 25-year investing track record spans the internet era, mobile boom, and early cloud wave—yet he characterizes Anthropic's growth as unprecedented among all startups he has backed. This distinction matters because it signals that AI-native companies may operate under different scaling dynamics than previous technology waves.

Murphy's insight that the model itself was never Anthropic's true competitive moat reshapes how founders should approach building in AI. By embedding the model into a broader ecosystem—Claude Code for developers, MCP (Anthropic's Model Context Protocol) for system integration, and Claude Skills for task-specific capabilities—Anthropic positioned itself as a platform rather than a point product. This platform architecture appears to be what has unlocked both rapid customer adoption and the financial trajectory the company has achieved. For founders competing in AI, this suggests that differentiation and growth depend less on model superiority in isolation and more on the surrounding tools, integrations, and services that make the model defensible and integrated into workflows.