Menlo Ventures and Anthropic chosen the primary 18 startups for his or her $100 million fund

Simply 5 months after saying a a new $100 million fund called the Anthology Fund, Menlo Ventures and Anthropic backed their first 18 startups. And so they’re searching for extra.

Menlo says these first 18 have been chosen from 1000’s of candidates. They embody startups engaged on recruiting software program; autonomous coding; analysis on interpretability (understanding how fashions make choices); fintech compliance and tax functions; radiology picture evaluation and chart assessment functions; non-human id cybersecurity; buyer engagement software program; and a shopper diet app. Moreover, there are eight others accepted into this system who’re nonetheless in stealth mode, Menlo says.

This program is considerably of a cross between a typical enterprise startup program (like The creation of Nvidia Or Microsoft for startups), the place startups get consumer credit and academic assets, in addition to an incubator the place they profit from consideration and funding for enterprise creation. The fund will ship checks of $100,000 or extra to startups – from pre-seed to Collection B – and supply them with $25,000 in credit to Anthropic models.

Menlo is a serious backer of Anthropic, and this fund helps put them in the course of the following massive factor in AI coming in 2025: a spotlight past the basic fashions and infrastructure of AI. AI and the brand new functions that work on it.

“We’re one of many largest buyers in Anthropic and massive followers of what they’re doing,” Menlo Ventures associate Tim Tully advised TechCrunch in July when this system launched. “We thought this was a chance for us to do one thing collectively, the place we might take a look at the ecosystem and discover nice firms which are leveraging Anthropic or AI extra broadly.”