Venture capitalist Deedy Das found himself in Japan in August with two commitments pulling him in different directions: a marriage proposal and a fast-moving startup deal.
While celebrating with his girlfriend at temples and hot springs, a founder he had been in contact with for eight months texted to say he was raising capital, Business Insider reported.
Das coordinated with colleagues from the trip and secured a handshake agreement the day after returning to California, a move that reflected the momentum that has now carried him to a partner role at Menlo Ventures.
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From Glean to Menlo Ventures: Engineering Roots in Billion-Dollar Growth
Das' career began on the technical side, working at Facebook and Google before joining enterprise search startup Glean.
He helped scale the company from pre-product to a $2.2 billion valuation, which later surged to $7.2 billion in June. The company is also expected to generate $250 million in annualized revenue by year-end, more than doubling from $100 million in 2024, according to Business Insider.
"His impact at Glean was significant as a founding engineer — from shaping our products and raising the bar on engineering excellence to mentoring teammates and helping build the culture that carried us through scale," Glean CEO Arvind Jain told the outlet. Jain also said that the systems Das built remain "still central to how our customers use Glean."
Das joined Menlo Ventures about a year and a half ago and has since focused on AI, infrastructure, and enterprise software, while helping launch the firm's $100 million Anthology Fund in partnership with Anthropic.
The fund has become a pipeline for early-stage bets on generative AI, giving Menlo credibility with startups that value technical investors, Business Insider reported.
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Betting Early on OpenRouter and Spotting AI Hype
Das made one of his boldest moves with OpenRouter, a platform that allows developers to access multiple large language models from one interface.
Reflecting on his first meeting with OpenRouter founder Alex Atallah, Das told Business Insider, "This is absolutely going to be useful. Model velocity is not going to stop. Whenever you're ready to raise, we're in." Menlo initially invested through the Anthology Fund before leading a $40 million Series A in June.
The startup has scaled quickly, jumping from processing 10 trillion tokens annually to more than 250 trillion, a 25 times increase in throughput, Business Insider reported. Because OpenRouter's revenue grows with usage, the surge signals a matching climb in revenue.
Das has also become known for cutting through hype with technical diligence. In one case, he examined retention data from a company's pitch and noticed that the numbers looked inflated. By running the figures through Claude Code, he discovered the startup had altered its retention curve to appear stronger than it was.
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Rising Star With Conviction in AI's Future
Das' deal flow has extended to Wispr Flow, an app that turns speech into polished writing, and Goodfire, a research lab studying machine learning model behavior. Both were seeded through the Anthology Fund before Menlo followed with larger checks.
"Deedy is someone who has conviction in bold ideas where others may be skeptical. He has an ability to see the future in a way," Goodfire CEO Eric Ho told Business Insider.
Menlo has been adding investors with similar technical depth, such as Matt Kraning, a cybersecurity founder whose company was sold to Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ:PANW) for more than $1 billion. Former Splunk chief technology officer and Menlo General Partner Tim Tully, told Business Insider that founders "want investors who they can talk shop with."
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