Shawn Carolan

Investing in consumer tech to make life better/faster/cheaper @Menloventures. Founder, engineer, product fanboy, dad, aspiring empath, and in ❤️ w @jencarolan

[Shawn Carolan @shawnvc]

Thank you @nmasc_ for getting to know us even better and helping blow out a few candles to celebrate our 50th along with the new funds! As an industry veteran you get it in a way most others don't.

[Natasha Mascarenhas @nmasc_]

Scoop: Menlo Ventures has raised $3 billion across several funds, to back AI startups across all stages - and to make more Anthropic-sized bets.

https://t.co/nsA4nbTev4

[Shawn Carolan @shawnvc]

Menlo is 50 and still going strong. Having been here roughly half of that journey, I'm particularly proud of our origins, the exceptional team we've assembled, the entrepreneurs we've backed, the missions we support, the way we do business, and the great LPs that have supported us through it all. Truly an ALL IN group I'm lucky to be a part of.

[Menlo Ventures @MenloVentures]

Menlo is 50 years in — and all in on AI.

Today, we’re announcing $3B in new capital to back the next generation of AI founders.

The companies that will define the next era are being built right now. We’re ready to meet the moment.

Read more: https://t.co/4SK6FGgcX1

[Shawn Carolan @shawnvc]

Huge congrats to my partner @mmurph for landing on the Midas List.

Great investor in both founders and markets, but more importantly builds our team, moves fast for his partners, pushes firm strategy, and sets the pace internally.

Well deserved Matt, first of many!

[mmurph @mmurph]

Appreciate @Forbes for including me on the Midas List w/so many uber talented co-investors + friends. Venture is a long game and you can’t time certain things. just show up as your best self everyday and focus on deep relationships w/entrepreneurs. That and a great set of partners is how we get energy and hopefully success in this business/craft over decades.

Lucky and humbled to work with the special team @MenloVentures , our amazing portfolio of entrepreneurs, and a great network and ecosystem that makes venture the unique industry it is. Much more to come! 🙏

[mmurph @mmurph]

Congrats @mattzeiler and team @clarifai. Long journey from a pioneer in CV many years ago to now best in class CO (compute orchestration). enjoyed working together and look forward to seeing you push inference capabilities for all forms of AI with team @nebiusai in the decade ahead!

[Owen Lewis @is_OwenLewis]

Okay folks, this qualifies as BREAKING NEWS!

Harold “Sonny” White, the warp drive pioneer behind NASA’s EagleWorks Lab, just stepped out of stealth with Casimir Inc. to unveil MicroSPARC: the first battery free chip to harvest continuous electrical power straight from the quantum vacuum via the Casimir force.

The 5 mm × 5 mm device uses millions of custom microscale Casimir cavities fabricated on a substrate. Inside each cavity, two fixed conductive walls create a region of negative vacuum pressure (the well known Casimir effect). Stationary micropillars anchored in the middle act as antennas. Electrons from the cavity walls then quantum tunnel to the pillars because the interior is a lower energy “quieter” zone — and the probability of tunneling back is orders of magnitude lower. This one way “quantum ratchet” flow generates a measurable DC current with no external power source or moving parts.

Prototypes already fabricated at university nanofab facilities (Texas A&M AggieFab, MIT.nano) have been tested in RF-shielded, low noise chambers for weeks. The team reports outputs ranging from millivolts to volts at picoamp to microamp levels using precision electrometers and Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy. Target performance for the first commercial chip: ~1.5 V at 25 µA (≈40 µW continuous). Stacking and scaling could reach milliwatts or even watts per device.

Initial applications are ultra low power: always on IoT sensors, wearables, and medical implants. Longer term roadmap includes trickle charging phones, powering small electronics, and eventually grid independent homes or EVs. Commercialization is targeted for 2028, starting at ~$100/W before dropping toward $10/W.

White ties the work directly to his earlier theoretical paper on emergent quantization from a dynamic vacuum and sees it as a practical power source for the deep-space missions he’s long championed.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and independent scientists have so far declined public comment. But if the engineering scales as hoped, MicroSPARC would represent a genuine paradigm shift: continuous, maintenance free power drawn from the fabric of spacetime itself.

A bold leap from warp-drive theory into real hardware. Progress (and vacuum-powered chips) marches on.

Photo: MicroSPARC | Casimir Inc.

Source: https://t.co/11tlwNSf71

[Shawn Carolan @shawnvc]

Question for your favorite AI:

"What's the most valuable question you can answer for me, give me the question and answer."

I got a great insight!

[Shawn Carolan @shawnvc]

The days of scrolling through lists of inbound messages is numbered. Please tag anyone we missed, excited to find an investment in this space. https://t.co/JgI6JMDRr2

[Shawn Carolan @shawnvc]

We need a word for the "Midas Touch" that means making the world a better place.

[Jennifer Carolan @jencarolan]

So excited to officially launch Cobalt Collective today. https://t.co/xqnyvOj5ph

[Menlo Ventures @MenloVentures]

Proud to see so many Menlo-backed companies on the Forbes AI 50 list this year, and @Accordance, @axiommathai, @flappyairplanes, @OpenRouter and @WisprFlow on the inaugural Brink list for early-stage startups. Congrats! 🎉

[Menlo Ventures @MenloVentures]

Incredible to see so many Menlo-backed companies on @Wing_VC and @EricNewcomer's 2026 Enterprise Tech 30 list!

Congrats to @AnthropicAI, @AbnormalAI, @cursor_ai, @databricks, @WeAreLegora, @Lovable, @EvidenceOpen, @OpenRouter and @WisprFlow 🎉

See the full list: https://t.co/cGbPx54Uaa

[Jennifer Carolan @jencarolan]

We are very proud to have invested in @replit 9 years ago. We invested out of our first $53M fund and re-invested 3x.

We were taken with @amasad vision to democratize coding and building. We could see that access to this skill would open up so many job opportunities traditionally unavailable to most . And that’s exactly what @Replit has done.

One of the great byproducts of this investment is that returns will benefit the many mission-driven and nonprofit organizations behind Reach I like @sesamestreet and @NextGenPF . They will flow back into the system to support the efforts of dozens of nonprofits, foundations and educational organizations.

[Deedy @deedydas]

2026 has been a generational year for us at Menlo already.

— Anthropic is the fastest growing company of all time adding $4.5B run rate in 42 days after the $380B round. We put ~$1B into it starting from the Series C
— Suno reaches 100M users and $300M ARR
— Lovable is the 5th most adopted and 2nd fastest growing AI vendor, going 0 to $200M in a yr
— OpenRouter grew 2.5x in 1.5 months. On track to 1 quadrillion token annual run rate.
— Higgsfield hits $200M run rate with creative tools and a $1B+ valuation.
— Wispr Flow continues to grow 40% MoM with a 70% 1 year retention and wins some massive enterprise contracts
— Clerk becomes #4 fastest growing vendor in the league of Google, Atlassian and Replit
— Inception launches the first and best reasoning diffusion model that is the fastest for its intelligence at 1000tokens/s
— Goodfire, Anthropic's first direct investment, hits $1B+ val and discovers novel biomarkers for Alzheimer's

Most VCs don't believe in this model of being picky, low volume investors. We do very few investments (up to 2/partner/yr) and we go early. 5 of these were partnerships since the Seed. It's been working for us so far (even though we've missed a lot too!)

It's an privilege to work with founders who run through walls and take on so much risk to bring new things into the world. And we're very lucky to play a small part in that! Still a lot of work to do.

[Mikey @MikeyShulman]

We launched Suno 2 years ago to let the world feel the joy of making music

Since then, over 100M people all over the world have used Suno, from music lovers to Grammy winners. We reached a new milestone: 2M paid subscribers, $300M ARR.

We are building the entertainment platform of the future. Endless scrolling and passive consumption have flattened culture and reduced people’s taste to a homogeneous, lowest common denominator. People yearn for more, and the future of consumer entertainment is creative. Suno lets everyone actively participate in music culture creation, bringing to life the music that’s inside millions of people. The future is creative entertainment.

PS: We’re hiring. If you love the nexus of technology and art, please get in touch: https://t.co/f1dlahiDA5

[Shawn Carolan @shawnvc]

@attaapp Show NVDA P/S and P/E ratio over the past 3 years

[Shawn Carolan @shawnvc]

@steipete @Hesamation @MenloVentures was the first investor in Siri, @steipete pls DM me!

[Shawn Carolan @shawnvc]

Rick rolls just aren't the same with pre-roll ads, @YouTube pls make this one exception

[Shawn Carolan @shawnvc]

Go team @goodfireAI, please figure out how these LLM things work, they are getting quite important... Love chasing the big missions @deedydas!

[Goodfire @GoodfireAI]

We raised a $150M Series B at a $1.25B valuation to fundamentally change the field of AI. Scaling is powerful, but we can't intentionally design what we don't understand.

[Omar Shaik @omarshaik]

Everyone's a data person now.

Introducing Atta, the AI that helps you run your business.

Connect your data. Ask why churn is spiking. Atta doesn't just give you a chatbot answer. It builds a gorgeous interactive analysis with the deep cuts you care about.

Business analysis just got personal.

Warm intros only. Founders, ask your VC for an invitation. 😉

[Shawn Carolan @shawnvc]

As a EE/CS MS grad, I always wished there was an O'Reilly guide for business. 4 prompts in and I have a cover 😆. Drop a heart if you're interested in the final preso.