Founders Fund
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Founders Fund is a San Francisco venture capital firm, founded in 2005 by the PayPal alumni Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek, that has become one of the largest and most aggressive backers of the artificial intelligence and defense boom of the 2020s. As of 2025 it managed roughly $17 billion in assets with a team of fewer than 40 people, and in 2026 it closed the largest fund in its history at $6 billion, a vehicle aimed squarely at late-stage AI, defense technology, and fintech.[1][3][4] Known for a contrarian, founder-friendly philosophy and an early tilt toward hard technology, space, and defense, the firm was the first institutional backer of SpaceX and an early investor in Palantir and Facebook, and in the AI era it has written some of venture's biggest checks into Anduril, OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale AI, and Ramp.[1][6][9]
Founders Fund was organized in 2005 by three veterans of PayPal, which eBay had bought for about $1.5 billion in 2002. Peter Thiel had co-founded and led PayPal; Ken Howery had been its chief financial officer; and Luke Nosek had been a co-founder. The firm raised a first fund of $50 million from individual entrepreneurs and angel investors in January of that year, and set up its offices in the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco's Presidio.[1]
The founders later took divergent paths. Luke Nosek stepped back from his role as a founding partner in 2017 to start his own investment firm, Gigafund, where he remains a managing partner.[20] Ken Howery moved into diplomacy: he was confirmed as U.S. Ambassador to Sweden in September 2019 and sworn in that October, and in 2025 he was confirmed as U.S. Ambassador to Denmark.[19] Thiel stayed the central figure, lending his name, capital, and contrarian worldview to the firm's identity.[1]
Founders Fund built its brand on contrarianism and a critique of incrementalism in technology. Its best-known statement of belief is a manifesto titled "What Happened to the Future?", written for the firm by Bruce Gibney around 2011, which argued that venture capital had drifted away from ambitious, world-changing bets.[2] The essay is remembered for the line, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters," a jab at an industry that, in the firm's telling, had grown comfortable funding social and mobile apps rather than breakthroughs in energy, biotechnology, space, and computing.[1][2]
Two ideas run through the firm's approach. The first is Thiel's belief in seeking monopolies and "definite optimism," the conviction that the best companies build something new rather than compete in crowded markets. The second is a founder-friendly stance that, at the firm's start, was framed as a direct challenge to the activist venture model: a promise not to push founders out of their own companies. Over time this philosophy pulled the firm toward deep tech and defense, sectors that many generalist funds avoided, and positioned it to capture outsized returns when those sectors became central to the AI era.
Peter Thiel remains the firm's defining partner and largest individual presence, both as an investor and as a financier of its funds. Brian Singerman, who joined in 2008, became one of the firm's most successful dealmakers, leading bets such as the cancer-therapeutics company Stemcentrx and the early backing of Anduril. On December 3, 2024, Singerman shifted from general partner to partner emeritus, scaling back day-to-day duties while staying connected to the firm; reporting noted he had spent more than 16 years there and would still bring in deals while taking fewer pitches.[21]
Trae Stephens, a former Palantir engineer who joined Founders Fund in 2014, is a partner and also a co-founder and executive chairman of Anduril, a dual role that ties the firm tightly to the defense-technology company.[7] Napoleon Ta is a longtime partner and one of the firm's directors. Other partners have included Scott Nolan, Delian Asparouhov (also a co-founder of the space company Varda), chief operating officer Lauren Gross, and Ryan Petersen, the founder of Flexport. Keith Rabois, another member of the PayPal network, was a partner from 2019 until January 2024, when he left to rejoin Khosla Ventures as a managing director.[18]
Founders Fund grew steadily from its $50 million debut into one of the larger venture franchises in the United States, and as of 2025 it reported roughly $17 billion in assets under management with a team of fewer than 40 people.[1] Beginning in 2020 it split its strategy into flagship early-stage funds and dedicated late-stage "Growth" vehicles that let it keep buying into its winners as they scaled.[5] The firm's fund history, as documented publicly, is as follows.
| Fund | Year | Size |
|---|---|---|
| Fund I | 2005 | $50 million |
| Fund II | 2007 | $220 million |
| Fund III | 2010 | $250 million |
| Fund IV | 2011 | $625 million |
| Fund V | 2014 | $1 billion |
| Fund VI | 2016 | $1.3 billion |
| Fund VII and Growth I | 2020 | about $3 billion combined |
| Fund VIII and Growth II | 2022 | about $5 billion combined |
| Growth III | 2025 | $4.6 billion |
| Flagship growth fund | 2026 | $6 billion |
The 2025 Growth III fund, at $4.6 billion, was the largest single raise in the firm's history at the time, and it was deployed unusually fast. The firm had expected to spend it over two to three years but instead committed it in under twelve months, the fastest deployment in its two-decade history, backing about seven companies at average checks of roughly $600 million, including about $1.25 billion into Anthropic and $1 billion into Anduril.[3][4] In May 2026 the firm closed a successor at $6 billion, described as its largest fund ever and its fourth dedicated late-stage vehicle, with about $4.5 billion from limited partners (including sovereign wealth funds) and roughly $1.5 billion committed by Thiel and senior staff themselves.[3][4][22]
Founders Fund's earliest defining bet was SpaceX. The firm became the rocket company's first institutional investor in 2008, with Luke Nosek championing an investment of about $20 million that many of the firm's own limited partners considered reckless at the time. The position became one of the most valuable in venture history as SpaceX's valuation climbed into the hundreds of billions of dollars. The firm was also an early backer of Palantir, the data-analytics company Thiel had co-founded in 2003, and Thiel personally made the first outside investment in Facebook in 2004, a connection that anchors the firm's reputation for spotting category-defining companies early.[1]
In the current AI and defense cycle, the firm has concentrated very large checks in a handful of companies. Its deepest commitment is Anduril, the defense-technology maker co-founded by Trae Stephens and Palmer Luckey; Founders Fund has backed Anduril from its 2017 seed round onward, and in June 2025 it led a roughly $2.5 billion round at a $30.5 billion valuation, investing about $1 billion, which it described as the largest check in its history.[6][7] The round was reported to be more than eight times oversubscribed.[7] Anduril doubled revenue in 2025 to about $2.2 billion, and in May 2026 it raised a $5 billion Series H at a $61 billion valuation, this time led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz rather than Founders Fund.[8]
The firm has also become a notable investor in the leading generative AI labs. It first invested in OpenAI in April 2023, joining a secondary tender that put just over $300 million into the company at a valuation of $27 billion to $29 billion, alongside Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, and K2 Global.[12] It deepened that exposure through later growth-fund deals, participating in OpenAI's roughly $8.3 billion round in August 2025 that valued the company at about $300 billion.[23] In February 2026 it was named among the co-leads of Anthropic's $30 billion Series G, which valued the maker of Claude at $380 billion post-money; reporting put the firm's check at about $1.25 billion.[9][10][11] Beyond the frontier labs, the firm has repeatedly led financings for the fintech Ramp, where it is the first and largest investor and has led at least five rounds, including a $16 billion-valuation round in June 2025.[13][14] Ramp continued climbing to a $44 billion valuation on a $750 million round in June 2026, though that financing was co-led by ICONIQ, GIC, and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, with Founders Fund participating as an existing investor.[15]
The firm has also been an important early backer of the AI data-infrastructure layer: it led Scale AI's $100 million Series C in August 2019, the round that made the data-labeling company a $1 billion unicorn.[24] It has backed the AI coding company Cognition and deep-tech roster companies such as Neuralink and Varda Space Industries.[1] Data aggregators also list Founders Fund among the investors in Elon Musk's xAI; the firm is a longtime Musk backer through SpaceX, though its specific participation and role in xAI's funding rounds have not been confirmed by primary reporting.
The table below summarizes selected AI and deep-tech positions where the firm's role is well documented.
| Company | Round / Year | Founders Fund role |
|---|---|---|
| SpaceX | 2008 (and later) | First institutional investor, about $20 million initial check |
| Palantir | Early rounds, mid-2000s | Early investor; Thiel co-founder |
| Anduril | Seed 2017 through 2025 | Recurring lead; led about $2.5 billion round in 2025, roughly $1 billion check (largest ever) |
| OpenAI | Secondary tender, April 2023; participated Aug 2025 | Participating investor (about $300 million in 2023; $8.3 billion round in 2025) |
| Anthropic | Series G, February 2026 | Co-lead; reported about $1.25 billion check |
| Ramp | Multiple rounds through 2026 | First and largest investor; led at least five rounds (participant in $44B round) |
| Scale AI | Series C, August 2019 | Lead investor; $100 million round, $1 billion unicorn valuation |
| Cognition | 2025 growth-fund era | Investor |
| Neuralink | Multiple rounds | Investor |
| xAI | Unconfirmed | Listed by data aggregators; not confirmed by primary reporting |
Founders Fund's track record includes several of the most prominent technology exits of the past two decades. Facebook, which the firm is closely associated with through Thiel's early stake, went public in 2012. Palantir went public through a direct listing in 2020 and grew into one of the most valuable companies tied to the firm's network. The firm also profited from public-market debuts including Spotify (2018), Airbnb (2020), and the Brazilian digital bank Nubank (2021). One of its largest single wins came from Stemcentrx, the cancer-therapeutics company that AbbVie agreed to acquire in 2016 in a deal valued at up to roughly $10.2 billion; the firm's position there is reported to have returned about $1.4 billion on an investment of around $300 million.[1][25] SpaceX, still private, represents an enormous unrealized gain that public filings and reporting have valued well into the tens of billions of dollars.
The firm's 2025 and 2026 activity centered on its push into AI and defense at growth stage, funded by the $4.6 billion Growth III and the $6 billion 2026 fund. Over this period it led or co-led the headline financings for Anduril, Anthropic, and Ramp described above, and it continued to add to OpenAI and other AI companies. The pace was so fast that, as one account summarized, the firm raised the new $6 billion fund "after burning through $4.6B in under a year on Anthropic, Anduril, and OpenAI."[3]
Separately, Brian Singerman launched a new firm of his own after stepping back to partner emeritus at Founders Fund. In July 2025, reporting from TechCrunch and others revealed that Singerman, together with Lee Linden (a co-founder of Quiet Capital), was raising a fund called GPx targeting more than $500 million, with Peter Thiel backing a large share, described in some accounts as potentially around half of the vehicle.[16][17] GPx uses a hybrid model: it allocates roughly a fifth of its capital to funds run by emerging seed-stage managers and reserves the remainder to co-invest alongside those managers in their breakout companies at later stages, typically around Series B.[16] The fund is reported to have closed in October 2025 with $500 million raised.[26] GPx is a distinct firm rather than a Founders Fund vehicle, though Thiel's involvement keeps it within the broader Founders Fund orbit.