Thrive Capital, the venture capital firm founded by Josh Kushner, has raised more than $10 billion — its largest fund ever, giving the firm an expanded war chest to invest in areas ranging from artificial intelligence applications and infrastructure to space, robotics and life sciences.
The fundraising was heavily oversubscribed, meaning Thrive turned away billions in prospective investments, the firm said. The cash influx, double the size of its last fund, reflects the outsized success of several of the firm’s startups in recent years, including OpenAI, SpaceX and Stripe — all now among the world’s most valuable private companies.
The size of its 10th fund, called Thrive X, is also a product of Kushner’s conviction that the artificial intelligence boom is still in its early days.
“We expect every important business vertical in the economy to be transformed,” he said. “The winners will be bigger than we can imagine.”
Kushner, whose brother Jared is son-in-law to US President Donald Trump, founded Thrive in 2009. The firm’s recent ascendance coincides with historic concentration at the top of the tech ecosystem. The 10 largest companies in the S&P 500 account for roughly 40% of the index’s total value. Currently 10 US companies carry market capitalizations above $1 trillion, eight of them tech giants, compared with just five companies worth over $200 billion in 2010.
Similarly, Thrive places relatively few bets, and makes big investments into portfolio companies as they grow. The firm writes checks to about a dozen new companies annually, across all stages of growth. “We want to make sure we can scale the fund so that we can be the most meaningful partner to the dozen great companies every year,” said partner Kareem Zaki.
The strategy has landed Thrive some big wins. It first backed the OpenAI in January 2023, a couple of months after the debut of ChatGPT, when the startup was valued at $29 billion. In the following years, Thrive added substantially to its position — an investment that proved prescient as OpenAI’s value has soared, potentially rising 30-fold to reach $830 billion in a planned funding round.
In 2014, Thrive invested in payments giant Stripe at a $3.6 billion valuation. That bet, and follow-on investments, also paid off in eye-popping fashion. Stripe is said to be planning a tender offer that will let employees sell shares at a valuation of at least $140 billion.
And the firm first backed SpaceX when the Elon Musk space startup was valued at $38 billion. SpaceX is now the largest private company in the world, after its merger with xAI vaulted its valuation to $1.25 trillion.
“High concentration is a high-risk strategy best suited for large, well-capitalized growth investors like Thrive Capital,” said Emily Zheng, a senior analyst at PitchBook. “For Thrive, that approach has paid off historically, and could deliver outsized gains in 2026 if even one of its megacap portfolio companies goes public.”
AI has been a theme of many of Thrive’s successes, including software firm Databricks Inc., coding startup Cursor and weapons company Anduril Industries Inc. The firm will continue to focus on the infrastructure and applications of AI, it said, along with emerging technologies.
“Thrive X gives us firepower to look at a moment, which is going to be turbulent,” said Nitin Nohria, Thrive’s executive chairman and a former dean of Harvard Business School. “Being well capitalized at this point will give us the opportunity to both continue to invest in the things that we already have conviction about, not get anxious about chasing and be ready to invest if things get less frothy.”
Thrive’s confidence today stems in part from its restraint during prior peaks. In 2021, as venture markets overheated, the firm distributed 64% of all capital raised, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the information is private. It also trimmed its public positions and stepped back from new deployments. Then, as tech valuations slumped in late 2022 and 2023, Thrive aggressively added to positions in SpaceX, Stripe, OpenAI, Databricks, Ramp and Wiz.
“A lot of people say they are dependable partners, there for the long term, unmoved by markets,” said Ramp Chief Executive Officer Eric Glyman. “But look at what was happening in 2023. No one was doing rounds except for Thrive really.”
The New VC
Under Kushner, 40, Thrive has taken a flexible, no-rules approach to investing, breaking with the traditional VC model in myriad ways. The firm backs public companies as well as private ones, it invents its own startups, and it’s spun out a $1 billion investment vehicle to help bring AI to old-world companies. It’s even invested in an underwear company.
“Our objective is to partner with the best entrepreneurs,” said Thrive Capital partner Vince Hankes. “It doesn’t matter if that’s an early-stage company, a growth company or a public company.”
Thrive has also backed non-tech investments in the belief they can’t be disrupted by AI. One example is shapewear brand Skims, co-founded by Kim Kardashian.
Where it sees a gap in the market, the firm has helped start companies, spinning up ideas for businesses and finding entrepreneurs to co-found them. Thrive has incubated more than 20 startups since its founding, with at least six now valued at more than $1 billion. One of those six companies is Oscar Health, co-founded by Kushner himself in 2012, and still backed by Thrive following its 2021 initial public offering.
Last year, Thrive Capital spun out a new $1 billion vehicle called Thrive Holdings — unusual in the VC world — which also incubates, operates and invests in businesses that aim to bring AI to accounting firms and other traditionally analog companies.
“We’re entrepreneurs that happened to start an investment fund,” said Zaki, who has co-founded several of the firm’s portfolio companies, including Cadence Health.
Unlike other VC firms, Thrive has declined to make a wide swath of bets on AI upstarts. Even as many firms pile into the mega-funding rounds of both OpenAI and rival Anthropic, Thrive has touted an ethos of not investing in competing firms. “We decide what team we’re going to play on,” Kushner said, and “play for that team. Ride or die.”
“You’re looking for someone who gets married to you,” said Lachy Groom, co-founder of portfolio company Physical Intelligence. “They’re not partners on the side.”
That partnership includes extensive support for portfolio companies, many of its founders say, including help with pricing, recruiting, go-to-market strategy and communications advice. “I’ve just been so impressed by the way that Thrive has really incredible operators on the portfolio services side,” said Mackenzie Burnett, CEO of finance platform Ambrook.
The advice it gives portfolio companies is partly informed by Thrive’s own AI tools for financial and market analysis, said Chief Operating Officer Nabil Mallick. Mallick helped reconstruct 15 years of internal data to help inform Thrive’s decision-making.
The company analyzes “every spreadsheet, memo and email tied to portfolio companies or prospective deals,” Mallick said. “This is not an IT helpdesk. These are some of the best engineers in the world. We believe we built a cheat code for ourselves.”
Finally, the firm has broken with the rest of the Silicon Valley crowd simply by not being headquartered in Silicon Valley. Its Manhattan offices (housed in the same building as OpenAI’s New York outpost), gives it an independence from tech industry group think, said West Coast-based partner Miles Grimshaw.
“Geographic difference makes it easy to be comfortable holding contrarian, but well-thought-through points of view,” Grimshaw said.
It’s unclear how long Thrive can operate as a contrarian newcomer, however. The latest funding brings its total assets under management to about $50 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, making it one of the largest venture firms in the world. And though it still identifies as unconventional, many of its portfolio companies — like OpenAI, Cursor and SpaceX — are now among the most sought after investments in the industry. Kushner said it can be disconcerting to feel mainstream.
“This new appreciation for Thrive makes us extremely insecure,” Kushner said. “We were doubted for so long that becoming consensus makes us uncomfortable. We think we’re at our best when we’re learning and iterating.”
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