Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund has raised $6 billion for a new fund focused on later-stage tech startups, marking the biggest fundraise in the firm’s 20-year-old history, reports Bloomberg.
The fund is the firm’s fourth growth-stage vehicle and was assembled less than a year after its predecessor — the fastest back-to-back fund cycle Founders Fund has ever run.
Of the $6 billion, $4.5 billion came from limited partners, including sovereign wealth funds, while the remaining $1.5 billion was contributed by Founders Fund’s senior management and employees, including Thiel himself.
The rapid succession reflects a broader shift in how the largest technology companies are raising money. High-growth startups are staying private longer and raising capital at scales previously associated only with public markets, creating sustained demand for late-stage private capital that firms like Founders Fund are built to supply.
Founders Fund is not alone in responding. Sequoia Capital recently raised approximately $7 billion for a new fund, and Thrive Capital closed a $10 billion vehicle, its largest to date.
Founders Fund is known for concentrating capital into a small number of large bets rather than spreading it across a wide portfolio. Its previous $4.6 billion growth fund was deployed quickly, with the firm frequently approaching companies before they had formally begun fundraising, and writing average cheques of around $600 million per company.
The prior fund backed artificial intelligence company Anthropic, in which Founders Fund invested $1.25 billion at a $350 billion valuation. It also put $1 billion into Anduril, the defence technology company co-founded by Trae Stephens, a general partner at Founders Fund, making it a related-party investment.
Other prior fund investments included fintech companies Stripe and Ramp, coding startup Cognition AI, and OpenAI, which Founders Fund has backed multiple times.
The new $6 billion fund is expected to follow the same concentrated approach, deploying capital over two to three years across approximately a dozen companies, according to Bloomberg’s sources.