Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is nearing the close of its fourth growth fund, Founders Fund Growth IV, with $6 billion in capital commitments, according to sources close to the firm. As with most of the company’s fund raisings, demand from outside investors exceeds the fund’s capacity, according to these sources. Additionally, about $1.5 billion of the capital comes from Founders Fund partners, one of the sources told TechCrunch.
The new fundraising comes less than a year after Founders Fund closed its third growth fund, a $4.6 billion vehicle intended primarily for follow-on investments in successful late-stage companies.
The 21-year-old company has an impressive portfolio of winning startups. Founders Fund was an early investor in cloud computing company Crusoe AI, workforce management platform Rippling and fintechs Stripe and Ramp.
The company was also the first institutional investor in data analytics giant Palantir Technologies and has stakes in several other defense technology companies, including SpaceX, Flock Safety and Anduril, which Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens co-founded and which the company has backed since its seed round. (Nine-year-old Anduril is reportedly currently growing a huge 4 billion dollars rounding to a $60 billion valuation.)
Founders Fund’s growth-stage capital ambitions are not limited to its existing portfolio.
Last month, for example, the San Francisco-based firm made its first direct investment in Anthropic. Founders Fund, along with DE Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, ICONIQ and MGX, co-led one investment of 30 billion dollars at the leading artificial intelligence lab with a post-money valuation of $380 billion. The investment makes Founders Fund one of the few companies with significant stakes in both leading AI labs — it’s also an investor in OpenAI.
Although Founders Fund has been aggressively raising growth capital, the company has not raised a new seed-stage fund since early 2022, when it announced its eighth seed-stage fund with capital commitments of $1.8 billion.
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In 2023, the company cut that fund in half to $900 million in response to worsening conditions. Founders Fund is reallocating the remaining $900 million to a separate early-stage fund that officially launched last October, according to regulatory filing.
Founders Fund declined to comment.
