Menlo Ventures

Headlines · 4

1. 3d
   Elorian releases Glimpse, a visual reasoning model with a 'visual scratch space'

   Elorian, a Palo Alto startup that raised a $55 million seed round at a $300 million valuation before launching a product, released its first model, Glimpse, on Friday as a research preview with API access and a chat interface, TechCrunch reported. Glimpse is designed to revisit the source image mid-reasoning, cropping into a region, pulling specific video frames or running code to measure what it sees — a mechanism Elorian calls a "visual scratch space." Elorian says a small team trained the model on a few hundred GPUs and that it is substantially smaller than frontier systems; its own evaluations claim it outperforms GPT-6 Astra on scientific chart reasoning and short-form video captioning. Pricing is $0.60 per million input tokens and $3 per million output tokens. No independent benchmark results were reported.

   TechCrunch AI · 🔥 0
2. 5d
   Modal raises $750M Series D at $15.75B valuation, tops $1B ARR

   AI infrastructure company Modal said it raised a $750 million Series D at a $15.75 billion post-money valuation, led by Accel with Kleiner Perkins joining and existing investors including Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, Redpoint, Lux Capital and Bain Capital Ventures participating. The company said it has crossed $1 billion in annualized run rate, that usage has tripled in the five months since its Series C and grown more than 15x year over year, and that its Sandboxes product alone runs at roughly a $300 million annual rate with close to 3 billion sandboxes started since 2023. It lists customers such as DoorDash, Ramp, Linear, Cognition and Runway, alongside robotics firms Physical Intelligence and 1X training robots on its platform.

   Modal Blog · 🔥 0
3. Oct 10
   Inside the OpenAI–Anthropic feud: Amodei's exit and the rivalry that followed

   A retrospective by Chinese outlet Gelonghui (republished by 36Kr) recounts the December 2020 OpenAI all-hands where the screen went black and Dario Amodei left with six core members, an episode internally dubbed "The Divorce," tracing the rift to the 2017 "Countries" AGI-consortium idea, an unwritten promise tied to Microsoft's $1B investment, and OpenAI's refusal to give Amodei's safety team veto power over model releases. It says Anthropic was founded in 2021 with plans for only 50 staff and cites 2026 rivalry figures: a $65B round in May at a $965B post-money valuation versus OpenAI's $852B, Anthropic at $65B annualized revenue by late July against OpenAI's just over $40B, and Menlo Ventures data showing Anthropic ahead on enterprise LLM spend 40% to 27%, with Claude Code at roughly 54% of the coding segment. It also says that on Oct 7 OpenAI pushed GPT-6 to all ChatGPT users (paid tier GPT-6 Sol, free tier GPT-6 Luna) while Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 per million input tokens, about 75% cheaper than the prior generation.

   36氪 人工智能 · 🔥 0
4. Oct 7
   Nous Research raises $90M at $1.5B valuation, launches Hermes for Businesses

   Nous Research, maker of the open-source Hermes agent, raised a $90 million Series B led by Robot Ventures, with participation from Nvidia, Samsung, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Y Combinator and 1789 Capital (The Next Web also lists Microsoft's M12). TechCrunch and The Wall Street Journal put the valuation at $1.5 billion, while Techmeme's headline says $1.2 billion; the company did not disclose a valuation itself. The money will fund "Hermes for Businesses," aimed at letting companies pick models by price and goal, keep AI usage private and own their company knowledge. Nous says Hermes has been cloned more than 24 million times since its February MIT-licensed release and drives roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage — its own estimate — while the Journal reported about $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September and an expectation of passing $100 million by year-end.

   Techmeme · 🔥 0

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