Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is nearing the close of its fourth growth fund, Founders Fund Growth IV, with six billion dollars in capital commitments, according to sources close to the firm. As with most of the firm’s fundraises, demand from outside investors exceeds the fund’s capacity. Additionally, about one and a half billion dollars of the capital is coming from the Founders Fund’s own partners.
This fresh fundraise comes less than a year after Founders Fund closed its third growth fund, a four point six billion dollar vehicle intended primarily for follow-on investments in its successful late-stage companies.
The 21-year-old firm has an impressive portfolio of winning startups. Founders Fund was an early investor in AI cloud computing company Crusoe, workforce management platform Rippling, and fintechs Stripe and Ramp. The firm was also the first institutional investor in data analytics giant Palantir Technologies and holds stakes in numerous other defense tech companies, including SpaceX, Flock Safety, and Anduril. Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens co-founded Anduril, which the firm backed from its first seed round. Nine-year-old Anduril is currently reported to be raising a massive four billion dollar round at a sixty billion dollar valuation.
Founders Fund’s growth-stage capital ambitions are not limited to its existing portfolio alone. Last month, for example, the San Francisco-based firm made its first direct investment in Anthropic. Founders Fund, along with other investors, co-led a thirty billion dollar investment into the AI company at a three hundred eighty billion dollar post-money valuation. This investment makes Founders Fund one of the few firms with significant stakes in both of the leading AI labs, as it is also an investor in OpenAI.
Although Founders Fund is aggressively raising growth capital, the firm has not raised a new early-stage fund since early 2022. At that time, it announced its eighth early-stage fund with one point eight billion dollars in capital commitments. In 2023, the firm cut that fund in half to nine hundred million dollars in response to worsening market conditions. Founders Fund reallocated the remaining nine hundred million dollars into a separate early-stage fund that officially launched last October.
Founders Fund declined to comment.