Menlo Ventures’ Matt Murphy explains why Anthropic is winning (and it’s not the model)

**Anthropic** hit a **$47 billion** revenue run rate by May, up from **$9 billion** in 2025. That jump is what **Menlo Ventures** partner **Matt Murphy** calls growth he has not seen in 25 years of investing—not during the internet wave, not mobile, and not the first cloud boom. Menlo led Anthropic’s **$500 million Series D**, so Murphy has watched the company move from pre-revenue to this scale from the inside.

The signal is not a new model release or a benchmark chart. It is revenue velocity: a multi-fold step from the 2025 run rate into the tens of billions within a short window. Murphy’s framing—that Anthropic is winning and that the edge is not the model—points the explanation toward how the company sells, ships, and embeds itself with customers rather than toward a single model score.

For engineers and builders, that distinction matters more than the headline ARR. If the winner is decided by distribution, product surface, trust, and go-to-market rather than raw model rank, then model swaps and eval leaderboards alone do not explain who captures budget. Teams buying or building on foundation models should treat commercial traction and how the product is actually used as first-class signals alongside technical capability.

In market terms, Murphy’s comparison sets Anthropic’s ramp against prior platform waves—internet, mobile, early cloud—not against a single peer’s quarterly print. Menlo’s Series D leadership and Murphy’s long seat on the path from pre-revenue to a **$47 billion** run rate make the claim an investor’s read of category-defining pace, not a casual analogy. The growth rate is the competitive fact on offer; everything else in the public summary is about how rare that pace is in venture history.

What to watch next is whether that run rate keeps compounding after May and whether Murphy’s “not the model” thesis holds as more detail on Anthropic’s GTM and product mechanics becomes public. The concrete numbers to hold are **$9 billion** (2025), **$47 billion** (by May), and the **$500 million** Series D Menlo led—not generic claims about AI’s future.