Lux Capital, a venture capital firm with a 25-year history of investing in frontier science and defense technology, has closed its ninth fund at $1.5 billion. This marks the largest fund in the firm’s history.
This significant raise comes despite 2025 marking a 10-year low for the number of new VC funds raised in the United States. It is not difficult to understand why limited partners continue to invest in Lux. The firm has been investing in defense technologies for years, long before recent geopolitical shifts made the sector a highly desirable investment category.
Lux was a seed-stage investor in Anduril, which was last valued at $30.5 billion. It also invested early in Applied Intuition, an autonomous vehicle startup that secured contracts with the Pentagon and was valued at $15 billion last year.
Beyond defense, Lux made early bets on AI startups before the industry’s explosive growth following ChatGPT. Its early-stage AI investments include Hugging Face, Runway AI, and MosaicML. MosaicML was acquired by Databricks for $1.3 billion in 2023.
In addition to being early to these major trends, Lux has realized significant exits. These include its investment in AI drug discovery company Recursion Pharmaceuticals, which went public in 2021, and the sale of surgical robotics pioneer Auris Health to Johnson & Johnson for up to $6 billion in 2019.
This latest fundraise brings Lux Capital’s total assets under management to $7 billion.