Big day for the Menlo portfolio.

— Wispr Flow raises $280M led by us at $2B. ~40x YoY rev growth and a total of 60B+ words dictated.

— Higgsfield raises $400M led by DST at $5.4B. $20M to $700M annual run rate in 12 months.

Winning on the app layer is difficult: software is easier to replicate than ever before ("what's the moat? Can’t I just vibecode this?") so you have to maniacally focus on product quality, growth, retention and monetization while scaling your infrastructure, spinning up enterprise sales and growing a world class team. It is much easier said than done.

Products that seem simple on the surface like voice dictation or video creation hide a ton of this complexity under the hood. And it’s impossible to do without exceptional entrepreneurs like Tanay / Sahaj and Alex at the helm.