Menlo Ventures is a venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 firm located at 3000 Sand Hill Road

Sand Hill Road

Sand Hill Road is a road in Menlo Park, California, notable for its concentration of venture capital companies. Its significance as a symbol of private equity in the United States may be compared to that of Wall Street in the stock market...

 in Menlo Park, California

Menlo Park, California

Menlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...

.

The firm was founded as one of the earliest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...

 in 1976 and provides provides technology venture capital funding for seed, early stage and growth companies. Menlo Ventures invests in consumer Internet, mobile, communications infrastructure, enterprise, security and storage. Since its founding in 1976, the firm has invested successfully in more than 360 companies, including 3PAR

3PAR

3PAR Inc. is a manufacturer of systems and software for data storage and information management headquartered in Fremont, California, USA. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard. 3PAR produces a range of enterprise storage products, including hardware disk arrays and storage management...

, Ironport Systems

IronPort

IronPort Systems, Inc., headquartered in San Bruno, California, was a company that designed and sold products and services that protect enterprises against Internet threats. It was best known for IronPort AntiSpam, the SenderBase email reputation service, and email security appliances...

, Siri

Siri

Siri or SIRI may refer to:Given name* Sigrid, a female name commonly shortened as Siri* Siri, a common Hindu female name, meaning "Goddess Lakshmi, Wealth, God's gift of love."* Siri von Essen, Swedish actress married to writer August Strindberg...

, Playspan, Coraid, and Vidyo

Vidyo

Vidyo, Inc. is a privately held, venture funded company that provides both software-based technology and product-based visual communication solutions...

. Its past and current portfolio includes more than 70 public companies and more than 100 mergers or acquisitions. It has $4 billion under management and is currently investing Menlo Ventures XI, a $400M fund.

Among its four original founders was H. DuBose Montgomery, who is still a managing director at the firm. Prior to that, Montgomery was a management consultant and communications researcher at Bell Laboratories. Other Managing Directors at the firm include Doug Carlisle, Shawn Carolan, John Jarve, Sonja Hoel Perkins, Shervin Pishevar, Mark Siegel and Pravin Vazirani.

Some of the firm's other successful investments include Ascend Communications

Ascend Communications

Ascend Communications was an Alameda, California-based manufacturer of communications equipment that was later purchased by Lucent Technologies in 1999....

, Gilead Sciences

Gilead Sciences

Gilead Sciences is a biopharmaceutical company that discovers, develops and commercializes therapeutics. For many years since the company was founded, the company concentrated primarily on antiviral drugs to treat patients infected with HIV, hepatitis B or influenza. In 2006, Gilead acquired two...

 , Bay Networks

Bay Networks

Bay Networks was a network hardware vendor formed through the merger of Santa Clara, California based SynOptics Communications and Billerica, Massachusetts based Wellfleet Communications on July 6, 1994...

, Hotmail

Hotmail

Windows Live Hotmail, formerly known as MSN Hotmail and commonly referred to simply as Hotmail, is a free web-based email service operated by Microsoft as part of its Windows Live group. It was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith and launched in July 1996 as "HoTMaiL". It was one of the first...

 (sold to Microsoft), UUNET

UUNET

UUNET founded in 1987, was one of the largest Internet service providers and one of the nine Tier 1 networks. It was based in Northern Virginia and was the first commercial Internet service provider...

 (sold to MCI Communications

MCI Communications

MCI Communications Corp. was an American telecommunications company that was instrumental in legal and regulatory changes that led to the breakup of the AT&T monopoly of American telephony and ushered in the competitive long-distance telephone industry. It was headquartered in Washington,...

), LSI Logic, Efficient Networks, Infoseek Corporation (sold to Disney), Endovascular Technologies (sold to Guidant), Frame Technology

Adobe FrameMaker

Adobe FrameMaker is a document processor for the production and manipulation of large structured documents. It is produced by Adobe Systems. Although FrameMaker has evolved slowly in recent years, it maintains a strong following among professional technical writers.- Overview :FrameMaker has more...

 (sold to Adobe), Octel Communications, Network Equipment Technologies, Open Solutions, Pyxis Corporation, Valid Logic Systems

Valid Logic Systems

Valid Logic Systems was one of the first commercial EDA electronic design automation companies. It was founded in the early 1980s, along with Daisy Systems Corporation and Mentor Graphics, collectively known as DMV....

 and Xros (sold to Nortel). Other notable investments include Acme Packet

Acme Packet

Acme Packet is a company based in Bedford, Massachusetts which produces and markets Session Border Controllers , multiservice security gateways and session routing proxies . It is a public company incorporated in Delaware...

, Carbonite

Carbonite

Carbonite may refer to:* Carbonite, a fictional substance in the Star Wars universe* Carbonite , one of the earliest and most successful coal-mining explosives* Carbonite , an online backup service...

, DriveCam

DriveCam

DriveCam, Inc. is a global driver risk management company located in San Diego, California. It specializes in designing, manufacturing and selling video driver safety programs used by commercial fleets....

, F5 Networks

F5 Networks

F5 Networks, Inc. is a networking appliances company. It is headquartered in Seattle, Washington and has development and marketing offices worldwide. It originally manufactured and sold some of the very first load balancing products...

, IMVU

IMVU

IMVU, Inc. is an online social entertainment destination in which members use 3D avatars to meet new people, chat, create, and play games created by Fydor Guthenschlag. IMVU has over 50 million registered users, 10 million unique visitors per month and three million monthly active users...

, IronPort

IronPort

IronPort Systems, Inc., headquartered in San Bruno, California, was a company that designed and sold products and services that protect enterprises against Internet threats. It was best known for IronPort AntiSpam, the SenderBase email reputation service, and email security appliances...

, MobiTV

MobiTV

MobiTV, Inc. claims to be a leading provider of "end-to-end mobile media solutions". The MobiTV converged media platform delivers live TV, video on-demand and the ability to download and store content for offline viewing to millions of users on all major wireless networks and major mobile...

, NComputing

NComputing

NComputing is a desktop virtualization company that manufactures hardware and software to create virtual desktops which enable multiple users to simultaneously share a single operating system instance....

, TeleNav

TeleNav

TeleNav, Inc. is a wireless location-based services company that provides several services including global positioning system navigation, local search, mobile advertising & commerce, enterprise mobility and workflow automation...

, Vidyo

Vidyo

Vidyo, Inc. is a privately held, venture funded company that provides both software-based technology and product-based visual communication solutions...

, SpeedDate.com

SpeedDate.com

SpeedDate.com is a speed dating website started by two Stanford graduates, Simon Tisminezky and Dan Abelon after an entrepreneurship class at Stanford Business School co-taught by Eric Schmidt....

, and Siri

Siri Personal Assistant

Siri is an intelligent software assistant and knowledge navigator functioning as a personal assistant application for iOS. The application uses a natural language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of web services...

(sold to Apple).

External links

• Menlo Ventures (company website)
• Menlo Ventures on CrunchBase