Anthropic Hits $47 Billion Run Rate — Menlo Ventures: No Growth Like This in 25 Years

By May 2026, Anthropic reached an annual run rate of $47 billion, up from $9 billion in 2025. Menlo Ventures partner Matt Murphy called the jump growth he has never seen in 25 years of investing.

How fast did Anthropic grow?

Anthropic raised its annualized revenue run rate from $9 billion in 2025 to $47 billion by May 2026, more than a fivefold increase in a matter of months. Menlo Ventures led the company's $500 million Series D round and has watched the business trajectory up close, with access to internal financials.

Run rate is an annual projection of revenue based on the current monthly or quarterly pace. The $47 billion figure means that if May's pace held, the company would earn that much over a year. It is not actual annual revenue but a snapshot of the business's speed, and it shows how sharply Anthropic has accelerated.

According to Murphy, the company started essentially pre-revenue and reached tens of billions of dollars in annualized revenue within a few years. The main driver is enterprise demand for Claude models and API integrations, although Menlo Ventures does not disclose an exact revenue breakdown.

• Run rate — $47 billion by May 2026
• For comparison — $9 billion in 2025
• Menlo Ventures led the $500 million Series D round
• Starting point — zero revenue (pre-revenue)
• The investor's assessment — 25 years of experience, no precedent

Why did it surprise the investor?

Murphy said he has not seen dynamics like this in any previous technology wave. Neither the internet boom of the late 1990s, nor the mass shift to mobile devices, nor the first cloud surge gave a single company this rate of revenue growth.

"I haven't seen growth like this in 25 years of investing — not in the internet wave, not in mobile, not in the first cloud boom," —

Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures, on a TechCrunch podcast.

Menlo Ventures is one of Anthropic's key investors: the firm led the $500 million Series D round. Murphy's assessment therefore rests on direct knowledge of the company's finances, not on outside analyst estimates. For a venture investor with a quarter century of experience, the comparison is a strong claim: he ranks Anthropic above the most successful cases he has personally seen, including the high-profile stories of the internet and mobile eras.

What should AI startup founders do?

According to Murphy, Anthropic's pace is raising the bar for the entire industry: what used to count as fast growth looks modest next to AI companies. In the TechCrunch interview, he lays out what AI startup founders now need to do differently to match the market's new speed.

The key shift is how fast a company reaches revenue. Anthropic went from pre-revenue to a $47 billion run rate, and that example sets the benchmark for new teams: the old assumptions about how many years it takes a startup to grow into the billions no longer hold in the AI sector. Investors, in Murphy's logic, now judge teams by their ability to grow at that pace from the first months.

What this means

Anthropic's growth to a $47 billion annual run rate shows that the AI sector is moving along a curve unlike anything in earlier technology cycles. For investors and founders, this is a new frame of reference in which familiar growth benchmarks no longer work, and the pace set by leaders like Anthropic is becoming the norm for the entire market.