Good day: Menlo Ventures pulled in a record fundraise for its growth investing practice this year. Now it has a new partner who will help invest those dollars.

The Menlo Park-based venture firm hired Alex Kurland, who was most recently a general partner at Meritech Capital Partners, to help lead its growth investing practice. Kurland, whose first day is Tuesday, joins a handful of other partners dedicated to Menlo's Inflection fund, which generally backs companies at the Series B stage and later.

Menlo said earlier this summer it had raised $3 billion. That includes $2.25 billion for vehicles that will make growth-stage investments, said Partner Matt Murphy, the firm's largest such haul ever.

Kurland, who spent time at Summit Partners and overlapped with Murphy at Kleiner Perkins before joining Meritech in 2018, said he thinks of Menlo as the most forward-thinking team in the AI era. He arrives at Menlo as the firm is paying more attention to growth-stage companies, an expansion of its focus beyond early-stage investments.

Menlo has become a leading Anthropic investor, first backing the company with what Murphy described as a smaller investment in its 2023 Series C. The following year, Menlo invested $500 million to lead Anthropic's Series D round. Since then, the firm has embraced larger, later-stage investments in a reflection of where it sees value in the market today, Murphy said. The strategy also allows Menlo to grow alongside its best portfolio companies, he said.

Kurland said he sees Menlo's dual focus as an advantage: "As a growth investor, given the speed at which the companies are growing, rounds are happening and the tech is evolving, it's more valuable than ever to have an early-stage team on the front lines, getting to know founders and markets at their inception," he said.

Read the full article here.

Top News

AI engineers on-site. Google Cloud and Accenture have formed Accenture Gemini Enterprise Business Group, a new unit at the professional-services firm aimed at helping customers deploy Google Cloud's agentic AI platform. As part of the arrangement, Google Cloud will help train up to 1,000 Accenture forward deployed engineers, or FDEs, who will work with clients on-site to plan and build AI applications on the Gemini Enterprise platform.

It's the latest in a series of bets made by AI companies that embedding their technologists directly inside customers' offices is the best way for enterprises to achieve meaningful returns on their AI investments.

Musk's Boring Co. Pushes Investors for Recruiting, Business Help

Elon Musk's tunneling startup, the Boring Company, has told some investors that participated in its latest funding round that they would have to help recruit Boring employees or assist with business development, such as making introductions to government officials in places where the company might build tunnels, according to people familiar with the matter. The Boring Company recently closed an investment round that values the company at around $20 billion, the people said.

Robinhood Wins a New Role in the Oura IPO: Underwriter

Oura's recent IPO filing listed a surprise underwriter: Robinhood Markets. It is the first official underwriting gig for Robinhood. Oura filed to go public on Thursday, in an offering that is expected to value it at north of $11 billion. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Allen & Co. and Jefferies are lead bookrunners on the deal. Robinhood is listed 18th and last. But that is still a victory.

Industry News

People

Self-improving software platform Factory named Francesca LaBianca as chief operating officer. She was previously at Mantis Venture Capital.

Risk and governance software provider Datamaran appointed Bert Sinnema as chief technology officer. He was previously vice president of engineering at Eye Security.

Defense technology startup Defense Unicorns appointed Lauren Knausenberger as chief business officer. She most recently served as executive vice president and chief innovation officer at SAIC.

New Money

Mistral AI completed a new funding round led by South Korea's Samsung Electronics that lifted its valuation above $24 billion, giving it additional firepower to invest in model development and grow its customer base.

Gimlet Labs, a San Francisco-based startup building a new cloud to enable faster, more efficient AI inference, scored $300 million in Series B funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, which included participation from Sapphire Ventures, Menlo Ventures, 645 Ventures, Eclipse, M12, Samsung Ventures and others.

HiddenLayer, an Austin-based AI security startup, landed $100 million in Series B funding led by Delta-v Capital.

PatientIQ, a Chicago-based patient outcomes intelligence platform, secured $30 million in Series C funding. Hughes & Company led the round, with Managing Partner Travis Hughes joining the company's board.

Atira, a Germany-based startup building an orchestration layer for industrial sales engineering, has raised $17.5 million in funding, including a $15 million seed round led by Accel.

Catch, a Tel Aviv-based agentic administrative assistant provider, was seeded with a $5 million investment co-led by Entrée Capital and Pitango.

Lightsage, a San Francisco-based startup helping companies optimize their products for AI agents, picked up a $4 million investment led by Nexus Venture Partners.

askpolly, a Canada-based market research platform that delivers insights from organic social media conversations, collected $3 million in seed funding led by Differential Ventures.

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The WSJ Pro VC Team

This newsletter was compiled by Matthew Strozier and Zachary Cole.

Share your tips, comments and questions: vcnews@wsj.com

The team: Matthew Strozier, Yuliya Chernova, Brian Gormley and Sarah Klearman.

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