The majority of the capital — $4.5 billion — comes from limited partners, including sovereign wealth funds, according to one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information. The remaining $1.5 billion is from senior management and employees at Founders Fund, including Thiel, the people said.
The firm’s fourth growth-stage investment vehicle was assembled less than a year after its predecessor, marking the fastest succession in Founders Fund’s two-decade history. The decision to quickly introduce a new and larger fund reflects the growing demand from more mature startups looking to raise unprecedented sums from private investors rather than going public.
Other venture firms have also been raising billions in new capital for later-stage investments, partly as a response to technology companies needing more money to afford expensive computing resources. Sequoia Capital recently raised about $7 billion for a new fund to expand its bets on large companies, Bloomberg News previously reported. Thrive Capital also raised a $10 billion fund, its largest to date.
Founders Fund, which is known for focusing on a select few marquee investments, rushed through investing its prior $4.6 billion fund, mostly by approaching companies to take on more capital before they had even kicked off formal fundraising. That pace represented a departure of sorts for Founders Fund, which typically spends about two to three years deploying each fund.
The firm’s third growth fund backed seven companies with average checks of roughly $600 million, according to the people. Founders Fund invested $1.25 billion in Anthropic PBC at a $350 billion valuation earlier this year, the person said, its first bet on the Claude maker. The remainder of the fund was used to back existing portfolio companies, including a $1 billion investment in Anduril Industries Inc., the people said. The defense technology company was co-founded by Trae Stephens, a general partner at Founders Fund.
The fund also poured money into financial technology firms Stripe Inc. and Ramp Inc., as well as coding upstart Cognition AI Inc. It also made a significant investment into OpenAI, which Founders Fund has backed several times.
The new growth fund will be similarly concentrated, but is expected to be deployed over two to three years. The plan is for it to back a dozen startups, the person said. TechCrunch previously reported the firm’s plans to raise a new fund.
SpaceX, which is expected to go public later this year, continues to be Founders Fund’s largest bet.
