Anthropic hits $47B run rate—growth its lead investor 'has never seen'

A $47 billion revenue run rate by May. That’s where Anthropic sits now, up from just $9 billion in 2025. Menlo Ventures’ Matt Murphy, who led the firm’s $500 million Series D into the company, told TechCrunch’s Equity podcast that in 25 years of investing—spanning the internet wave, mobile, and the first cloud boom—he’s never witnessed growth like this. Menlo bet on Anthropic at a $4 billion pre-revenue valuation when the deal didn’t fit neatly into any of their existing funds. At the time, Murphy said, nobody else would touch it.

Looking back, he points to Google and Amazon signing on as investors as an early “green shoot” that validated the thesis. But Murphy is blunt about what was never the real moat: the model itself. “The model was never the point,” he said. What turned Anthropic from a strong research lab into a full-fledged platform were moves like launching Claude Code, the Model Context Protocol, and Claude Skills. Those tools, he argues, are what lock developers in and make the business defensible.

The conversation also veered into the backlash around Anthropic’s Mythos rollout. Critics called it more marketing than safety. Murphy pushes back hard on that characterization. And when the discussion shifts to the broader startup ecosystem, he names names—Lovable and Legora specifically—as companies growing faster than anything he’s seen. For founders trying to compete against that velocity, the old playbooks won’t cut it.