Founders Fund moves closer to $6B target for new growth investment fund

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is nearing the close of its fourth growth fund, Founders Fund Growth IV, with capital commitments totalling $6 billion, according to sources familiar with the firm. As with many of the firm’s previous fundraising efforts, demand from outside investors is said to exceed what the fund can accommodate, those sources said. One of the sources added that roughly $1.5 billion of the total capital is coming from Founders Fund’s own partners.

The new fundraising push comes less than a year after Founders Fund closed its third growth fund. This $4.6 billion vehicle was designed primarily to support follow-on investments in the firm’s successful late-stage portfolio companies.

The 21-year-old venture firm has built a strong portfolio of breakout startups. Founders Fund was an early backer of the AI cloud computing company Crusoe, the workforce management platform Rippling, and the fintech firms Stripe and Ramp.

The firm was also the first institutional investor in data analytics company Palantir Technologies and holds stakes in several other defence tech businesses, including SpaceX, Flock Safety, and Anduril, which was co-founded by Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens and backed by the firm from its very first seed round. Nine-year-old Anduril is reportedly raising a huge $4 billion round at a $60 billion valuation.

Founders Fund’s ambitions in growth-stage investing do not stop with its existing portfolio.

Last month, for instance, the San Francisco-based firm made its first direct investment in Anthropic. Founders Fund, together with D. E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, ICONIQ, and MGX, co-led a $30 billion investment in the AI company at a $380 billion post-money valuation. That investment makes Founders Fund one of the few firms with major stakes in both leading AI labs, as it is also an investor in OpenAI.

Even as Founders Fund moves aggressively to raise more growth capital, it has not launched a new early-stage fund since early 2022, when it announced its eighth early-stage fund with $1.8 billion in capital commitments.

In 2023, the firm cut that fund in half to $900 million in response to worsening market conditions. Founders Fund then shifted the remaining $900 million into a separate early-stage fund that officially launched last October, according to a regulatory filing.