Anthropic launches $100 million AI fund with Menlo Ventures, ramping up competition with OpenAI

Anthropic and one of its biggest investors are taking a page from Apple’s playbook.

The artificial intelligence startup and Menlo Ventures are launching a $100 million fund on Wednesday to back early-stage startups, and get them using the AI company’s technology. Menlo will put up the cash to invest in the startups, while Anthropic will give founders $25,000 in credits that go toward using its large language models.

The launch of the Anthology Fund mirrors a partnership between Apple and venture firm Kleiner Perkins. The joint venture, called the iFund, was introduced in 2008, a year after the iPhone hit the market, to support developers on Apple’s mobile platforms. It initially started with $100 million in 2008, and doubled to $200 million two years later.

Matt Murphy, a partner at Menlo Ventures and a former partner at Kleiner Perkins, said the iFund was the inspiration for this launch.

“That was wildly successful — it really gave Apple a lens into a whole set of early developers, and what they need to be more attentive to,” Murphy told CNBC. “It also gave developers a direct lens into some of the things that Apple was thinking about selling. There’s a lot of parallels here.”

The big difference, Murphy said, is that AI is moving faster than iPhone development. He said this current wave of AI is happening 10 to 100 times quicker than “what was previously the biggest wave of innovation we’ve seen.”

Venture capitalists are now looking for ways to sweeten their offers to court AI startups, as investors swarm to the hottest deals. Funding for AI startups more than doubled in the second quarter from the first, topping $24 billion, according to data from Crunchbase.

Anthropic is offering coaching, quarterly meetups and other resources, including what amounts to a hotline directly to the company, or what Murphy described as a “bat phone.”

But Anthropic won’t write any equity checks, or get a financial stake in the startups. Daniela Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic with her brother, Dario, after leaving rival OpenAI, said the company wants to establish a feedback loop. The more Anthropic partners with developers, the more it can improve its own products.

“In AI, it’s very expensive to get started — it can actually be a deterrent to launching your company,” Daniela Amodei told CNBC. “Our goal here is to contribute that component. We’re providing credits and also some guidance on how to get started in the ecosystem.”

Anthropic can also benefit from having the next generation of high-flying AI companies building on its underlying infrastructure. Anthropic directly competes with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

OpenAI has its own venture fund, the OpenAI Startup Fund, which its website says is “investing $175 million to help AI companies have a profound, positive impact on the world.”

Murphy differentiated the Anthology Fund, and said, “it’s hard to provide alignment with another strategic partner.”

“It’s a unique opportunity for Anthropic, for us and a set of entrepreneurs that we’re going to be funding over the next couple of years to be part of this, build a great community, learn together, do some of the most disruptive, innovative things and really build something great,” Murphy said.