Photos of Amodei and wealth fund officials including Ibrahim Ajami, head of ventures at Mubadala Capital, were widely circulated online. Missing from the headlines was the trip’s organiser: Iconiq, a financial firm that has managed the personal fortunes of senior figures in West Asian and Asian governments for more than a decade, as well as those of tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella.
Historically a behind-the-scenes operator, Iconiq has grown into a behemoth with $100 billion in assets under management, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg. Its clients have included global royal families, billionaires and A-list stars like Tom Cruise and Pharrell Williams. Recently, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has also signed on as a client.
Now, Iconiq is further branching out from the relatively staid world of money management and expanding its reach into venture capital – making big bets on companies like Anthropic, pioneering a new style of investing and becoming a multibillion-dollar force in tech’s AI frenzy. Iconiq put more than $3 billion into AI startups in 2025 alone, on par with the investment tallies of some of Silicon Valley’s best-known VC firms.
Up next, San Francisco-based Iconiq is upping the stakes for its venture arm, with plans to raise billions for a new fund, according to a securities filing. That would add to its $26 billion under management specifically for VC investing, making it one of the country’s biggest startup investors.
Some of Iconiq’s early VC bets have already paid off. The firm’s first four funds, all launched before 2020, rank among the top 25% of their peer groups as of the end of last year, based on the most recently available Cambridge Associates benchmarks. For example, Iconiq’s first fund, a $509 million vehicle launched in 2013, returned investors 2.6 times their money. Its second fund, at $1.02 billion, brought investors 4.2 times their money as of the end of last year, performing in the top 5% of its peer group from that year.
Iconiq raised $5.75 billion for its last VC fund, and has invested about $4 billion in Anthropic, a large language model maker barrelling toward an IPO. It is one of the largest investors in the startup.The San Francisco firm is unfazed by industry worries that AI companies could be overvalued, instead focusing on the technology’s potential to remake swaths of the existing economy. “It’s been all AI, all the time,” Iconiq partner Matthew Jacobson said in an interview. “The creative destruction creates a tremendous amount of opportunity.”
Balling With Beckham
Investor Divesh Makan, 52, is the driving personality behind Iconiq. Born in South Africa, Makan is exuberant but polished, likening his role to that of a golf caddy – helpful, humble and out of the spotlight.
Makan made an early name for himself as a financial adviser for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, where he met Zuckerberg. When Makan co-founded Iconiq in 2011, Zuckerberg was one of his earliest clients – and proved to be an extremely influential one. Iconiq soon attracted other executives in that orbit, including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, former Meta Platforms COO Sheryl Sandberg and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn.
The idea behind the new firm was to create a wealth management outfit built on long-term relationships, Makan has said. They wanted to build a group that could help with virtually anything – think, arranging private jets to evacuate a client from a snowed-in ski resort, or setting up exclusive real estate purchases. Today, employees at Iconiq are still pushed to provide clients with memorable moments, and to maintain absolute discretion.
Iconiq is exclusive about who it lets in as a wealth management client. For example, it determined musician Kanye West was a public relations risk, according to a 2021 report, before his most eye-catching scandals. “We end up being fairly targeted in who we invite because this business is not scalable,” Makan told Bloomberg in a 2024 interview. The firm generally includes clients with $25 million in net worth. In practice, its median client has about $1 billion in assets, Makan said in 2024.
For the people it does work with, Iconiq aims to provide “spine-tingling” service, said London partner Seth Pierrepont. “We sort of operate on this mantra of giving twice before asking once.”
That could mean organising exclusive events, like a soccer scrimmage with David Beckham for a client and his family, or hosting a private movie screening for a new Mission: Impossible film attended by Tom Cruise himself. The firm is also able to offer key connections to important people. It’s not unheard of for Iconiq to make more than 100 introductions to potential customers for a startup, even before investing. Part of the firm’s mandate is to make “goosebump-inducing introductions that others can’t,” Pierrepont said, “just given, you know, the unique folks that are in this community.”
