Thrive Capital
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Thrive Capital is a New York City venture capital firm founded by Josh Kushner in 2009 (some accounts date the firm to 2010). It is known for a concentrated, high-conviction style of investing: rather than spreading capital across dozens of startups, Thrive backs about a dozen new companies a year and then invests repeatedly and heavily as the winners scale. The firm has been an early or major backer of Instagram, Stripe, Databricks, Anduril, Scale AI, SpaceX and, most consequentially, OpenAI, the generative AI company whose $6.6 billion round Thrive led in October 2024.[1][5] By February 2026 the firm had closed its tenth flagship fund at $10 billion and said it managed more than $25 billion in assets.[3] Kushner owns the large majority of the management company and, according to Forbes, was worth about $5.2 billion as of November 2025.[2]
Joshua Kushner was born on June 12, 1985, in Livingston, New Jersey. He is the younger brother of Jared Kushner and the son of real estate developer Charles Kushner, and he married the model Karlie Kloss in 2018. He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 2008 and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2011, and he worked briefly at Goldman Sachs before starting to invest on his own.[2]
Kushner founded Thrive in 2009 at age 24, raising a small debut fund of roughly $5 million. Joel Cutler, a co-founder of General Catalyst, provided early seed capital and introduced Kushner to limited partners.[1][16] An early position in Instagram, whose value rose sharply after Facebook acquired the company in 2012, helped establish the firm's track record. Kushner also co-founded the health insurer Oscar Health in 2012, which went public in 2021, and he is a minority owner of the NBA's Miami Heat. Jared Kushner sold his stake in Thrive in 2017 to avoid conflicts of interest when he joined the first Trump administration as a senior advisor.[1][2]
Thrive has scaled its funds steadily, roughly doubling fund size with most vintages. Its eighth fund closed at $3 billion in 2022, and its ninth at $5 billion in 2024.[15] In February 2026 the firm announced Thrive X, its tenth and largest flagship fund, at $10 billion, with about $1 billion reserved for early-stage deals and the remainder for growth-stage investments; Thrive told Bloomberg the fund was oversubscribed.[3][4] The firm said the new fund would target AI applications and infrastructure as well as space, robotics and life sciences.[3]
| Fund | Year | Committed capital |
|---|---|---|
| Thrive I | 2009 | about $5 million |
| Thrive II | 2011 | $40 million |
| Thrive III | 2012 | $150 million |
| Thrive IV | 2014 | $400 million |
| Thrive V | 2016 | $700 million |
| Thrive VI | 2018 | $1 billion |
| Thrive VII | 2021 | $2 billion |
| Thrive VIII | 2022 | $3 billion |
| Thrive IX | 2024 | $5 billion |
| Thrive X | 2026 | $10 billion |
Across these funds Thrive has raised more than $22 billion, and the firm said in February 2026 that assets under management exceeded $25 billion; reports in early 2025 had put the figure at roughly $15 billion.[1][3] Kushner has sold only small slices of the management company itself. In 2021, Goldman Sachs and its Petershill unit took a minority position that valued Thrive at about $3.6 billion, and in January 2023 a group including Bob Iger, Mukesh Ambani, Henry Kravis, Xavier Niel and Jorge Paulo Lemann bought a roughly 3.3 percent stake at a valuation of about $5.3 billion. Those sales left Kushner with a reported 96.7 percent of the firm.[1]
Thrive's bet on OpenAI is the defining position of the firm and one of the largest concentrated wagers in venture history. Thrive first invested about $130 million in early 2023 at a $29 billion valuation, in what was reported to be the only term sheet OpenAI received at the time.[1]
In October 2024, Thrive led OpenAI's $6.6 billion round at a $157 billion post-money valuation. Thrive contributed about $1.25 billion (the figure reported by the Wall Street Journal; other accounts cited roughly $1.3 billion) and negotiated an exclusive option to invest more at the same valuation, with reported amounts ranging from $1 billion to as much as $4 billion. The round also drew Nvidia, Microsoft, SoftBank, Khosla Ventures, Altimeter, Fidelity and MGX, and Bloomberg reported that investors could claw back their money if OpenAI failed to convert from a nonprofit to a for-profit structure within two years.[5][6]
The valuation climbed quickly after that. In March 2025, OpenAI closed a roughly $40 billion round led by SoftBank at a $300 billion post-money valuation; Thrive participated alongside Microsoft, Coatue and Altimeter, but it did not lead.[7] In October 2025, an employee tender offer of about $6.6 billion priced OpenAI at $500 billion, making it the most valuable private startup in the world; the buyers included Thrive, SoftBank, Dragoneer, Abu Dhabi's MGX and T. Rowe Price.[8][9][17]
In December 2025, according to CNBC, Thrive invested about $1 billion more in OpenAI at a $285 billion valuation, a price below the $500 billion mark set by the October tender. CNBC described it as a preferential deal for a firm that had long been one of OpenAI's main backers.[12] At the same time, the relationship turned reciprocal. On December 1, 2025, OpenAI said it would take an equity stake in Thrive Holdings, a separate operating company Thrive launched in April 2025 that buys and runs businesses it believes can benefit from AI. The deal involved no cash; instead OpenAI agreed to embed engineering, research and product teams inside Thrive Holdings' companies, starting with accounting and IT services, and to grow its stake as those companies scale.[10][11]
Beyond OpenAI, Thrive has built large positions across AI infrastructure, applications and adjacent software. It led the $10 billion Series J for Databricks in December 2024 at a $62 billion valuation, investing about $1 billion on its own, then co-led the company's Series K with Andreessen Horowitz in August 2025 at a valuation above $100 billion, a step-up of roughly 61 percent.[13][14] Other holdings span Scale AI, defense contractor Anduril, coding-tool maker Anysphere (the company behind Cursor), cloud-security firm Wiz, and the robotics startup Physical Intelligence, alongside long-held software bets such as Stripe, SpaceX, Ramp, Plaid, Airtable, Affirm, Nubank and Robinhood.[1][3]
Anysphere is one of Thrive's most prominent applied-AI positions. Thrive led Anysphere's roughly $900 million round in June 2025 at a $9.9 billion valuation, alongside Andreessen Horowitz, Accel and DST Global, after Cursor's annualized revenue passed $500 million.[19] By April 2026, Thrive was the second-largest outside shareholder in Anysphere, with a stake reported at about 7 percent, as the company held talks to raise about $2 billion at a roughly $50 billion valuation in a deal again co-led by Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz.[20] In robotics, Thrive joined Physical Intelligence's $400 million round in late 2024 at a $2.4 billion valuation, an investor group that also included OpenAI, Jeff Bezos and Lux Capital, and it returned for the company's $600 million round in November 2025 at a $5.6 billion valuation, which was led by Alphabet's CapitalG.[21][22]
The table below lists notable AI and technology investments.
| Company | Round / year | Thrive's role and amount |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | early 2023; Oct 2024; Dec 2025 | About $130M at $29B; led the $6.6B Oct 2024 round (about $1.25B) at $157B; about $1B at $285B in Dec 2025 |
| Databricks | Series J, Dec 2024; Series K, Aug 2025 | Led Series J (about $1B) at $62B; co-led Series K with a16z at over $100B |
| Stripe | growth, 2014 onward | Early backer (an initial check of about $30M); one of its largest positions |
| Anduril | growth rounds | Investor in the defense-technology company |
| Scale AI | growth | Investor in the data-labeling and AI company |
| Anysphere (Cursor) | June 2025 round; ~$2B round, 2026 | Led the ~$900M round at $9.9B; about 7% stake; co-leading a ~$2B round at ~$50B in 2026 |
| Physical Intelligence | late 2024; Nov 2025 | Investor at $2.4B (with OpenAI and Bezos); returned at $5.6B (CapitalG led) |
| Wiz | growth | Investor; company acquired by Google in 2025 |
| SpaceX | secondary / growth | Investor |
| Ramp | multiple rounds | Investor in the corporate-spend platform |
| seed, 2011 | Early investor; acquired by Facebook in 2012 | |
| GitHub | Series A, 2012 | Investor; acquired by Microsoft in 2018 |
| Nubank | growth | Investor; company went public in 2021 |
Thrive runs a deliberately concentrated book. The firm writes checks to about a dozen new companies a year across all stages and then adds aggressively to its highest-conviction names as they grow. In its February 2026 fund announcement, Thrive framed the approach as a commitment "to a small number of founders," adding that "concentration demands loyalty to the founders and missions we back."[3] The firm has also incubated companies of its own, reporting that it had helped start about a dozen, several of which became unicorns.[3] Thrive employs in-house operating and data teams to support portfolio companies, a model the Financial Times has described as investing heavily in fewer businesses to build closer founder relationships.[1]
That concentration is also the main source of criticism. A position as large as Thrive's in OpenAI exposes the firm and its limited partners to the fortunes of a single company at valuations that rose from $157 billion to $500 billion in roughly a year. The reciprocal Thrive Holdings arrangement drew particular scrutiny: TechCrunch grouped it with other "circular" AI deals, such as OpenAI's investment in CoreWeave, in which capital and compute flow between connected parties in ways that can make it hard for outside investors to judge whether portfolio companies are succeeding on their own merits or because of OpenAI's direct support.[11] Analysts have also flagged conflict-of-interest questions given that Thrive holds stakes on both sides, and have noted that preferential rights, such as the option Thrive secured in 2024, can disadvantage minority shareholders.[11][12] Thrive's defenders point to its returns, including reporting that its 2016 fund had returned more than twice its invested capital to limited partners.
Josh Kushner is the founder and chief executive and remains the firm's controlling owner. Nitin Nohria, the former dean of Harvard Business School, has served as executive chair since 2022.[1] Senior investors include general partner Kareem Zaki, who joined in 2014, and partner Vince Hankes, who has worked on the OpenAI, SpaceX, Databricks and Stripe investments. Miles Grimshaw, a West Coast partner, has been associated with the firm since 2013, and Philip Clark is also among the partners. Will Gaybrick, a former Thrive general partner, wrote the firm's early check into Stripe in 2014 and later joined that company, where he became a senior executive. General Catalyst co-founder Joel Cutler was an important early supporter of the firm.[1] By comparison with West Coast peers such as Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive remains unusually founder-controlled, with Kushner holding the bulk of the equity, and it competes for the same frontier-AI deals in large language models and AI agents that those firms and rivals backing Anthropic pursue.[18] That competition is intense: Andreessen Horowitz, for example, led the $2 billion seed round for Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab in July 2025 at a $12 billion valuation, one of the largest seed rounds on record, underscoring how aggressively top venture firms are pricing access to ex-OpenAI founders and frontier labs.[23]