Founders Fund is an American venture capital fund founded in 2005 based in San Francisco. The fund has roughly $17 billion in total assets under management as of 2025. The firm was founded by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek.
Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Palantir Technologies, and an early investor in Facebook. The firm's partners have been founders, early employees and investors at companies including PayPal, Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries and SpaceX. The firm's investments include Airbnb, Anduril, DeepMind, Rippling, Facebook, Ramp, Palantir Technologies, Polymarket, Pudgy Penguins, SpaceX, Spotify, Stripe, Neuralink, and Nubank.
Notable partners include Peter Thiel, Trae Stephens, and Mike Solana. Former partners include Brian Singerman, Keith Rabois, Cyan Banister, Ken Howery, Kevin Hartz, Sean Parker, and Bruce Gibney.
Funding history
The firm was organized by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek in early 2005 and raised its first fund of $50 million from individual entrepreneurs and angel investors in January of that year. Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and ex-president of Facebook, joined in 2006. In 2007, the firm raised a new fund of $220 million.
In 2010, the firm raised its third fund, with $250 million in committed capital, and in 2011, a fourth fund with $625 million of committed capital was raised.
In 2014, Founders Fund raised a $1 billion fifth suite of funds, bringing the firm's aggregate capital under management to more than $2 billion.
In 2016, Founders Fund raised a sixth, $1.3 billion fund, bringing the firm's aggregate capital under management to more than $3 billion.
In 2020, Founders Fund raised a seventh flagship fund and its first growth fund, representing $3 billion in new capital and bringing the firm's aggregate capital under management to more than $6 billion.
In 2022, Founders Fund raised an eighth flagship fund and its second growth fund, representing over $5 billion in new capital and bringing the firm's aggregate capital under management to more than $11 billion.
In March 2023, Founders Fund cut the size of its eighth venture capital fund in half, from around $1.8 billion to around $900 million, to adapt to uncertain market conditions. This was the idea of Thiel, who thought "venture capital is due for a slimdown", which caused some resistance from inside the firm.
In 2025, Founders Fund raised its third growth fund, Founders Fund Growth III, at $4.6 billion for late-stage investments. Julie Bort of TechCrunch remarks that, "Founders Fund is so big and successful that it can always raise an oversubscribed fund should it choose to." The over-subscription seemed to anticipate an era of big VC spending, and also expansion of the defense sector. Meanwhile, CNBC commented that, "Hefty amounts of private capital are likely to be needed for the foreseeable future as the IPO market remains virtually dormant".
Philosophy and development
The Founders Fund was conceptualized as an early-stage venture capital fund. From the start, it has adopted Thiel's contrarian attitude, and bet early and aggressively on companies with the founders it deemed deserving of trust. Early in its history, it made many investments in internet or social media and health and life science research, among which there were investments in Spotify, Airbnb, and Lyft. By 2006, Jessica Guynn of SFGate characterized it as a tiny but influential fund focusing on consumer internet, standing beside Thiel's then extraordinarily successful firm Clarium Capital.
Later, together with Thiel's disillusion with social media companies, the firm has gradually developed into a primary backer of hard tech and defense technology. In 2011, when the social bubble was still expanding, he complained, "Is Twitter worth $7 billion?" At this time, the Founders Fund had developed a portfolio in artificial intelligence, biotech and space technology. In 2017, it published the manifesto "What happened to the future?", written by Bruce Gibney. The manifesto denied that the Internet's potential had been exhausted, but emphasized that the Founders' Fund would focus on ambitious projects that resolved real challenges. The original subtitle was Thiel's famous motto "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."
Julie Bort, the venture editor at Techcrunch remarks that it boasts perhaps the most formidable defense portfolio in the Silicon Valley. The Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, America's Frontier Fund, as well as the leaders of these firms, namely Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Eric Schmidt, are often considered the dominance forces in the new defense tech domain. Camden Mead writes on the website of the Utah Aerospace and Defense Association that, together with Andreessen Horowitz, the Founders Fund "has prioritized investing in revolutionary technologies, including various forms of autonomous vehicles. Both of these firms are relatively new to the defense space but are singlehandedly changing how traditional investors view the aerospace, deep tech, and defense ecosystem."
The firm also turned to investing in companies in both early and later stages of development. Its first fund dedicated to late-stage startups was created in 2019. At the annual meeting in September 2025, partners indicated the firm's third growth fund would invest about $460 million per company (with a total of 10 portfolio companies), compared with $225 million in its second fund (with 15 companies) and $55 million in its first (with 31 companies), showing a turn towards concentrated late-stage bets.
Structure-wise, there are three directors, each with powers to veto over any deals over $10 million. It is known, though, as in his other companies, that Thiel prefers to surround himself with people who share his thinking and loyal to him, and often manages to steer them to partnership, as seen in the cases of Keith Rabois, Sean Parker, Max Marmer or Trae Stephens. The tech writer Mario Gabriele writes that, "At the heart of Thiel’s power, influence, and wealth is Founders Fund. No organization has benefited more from his singular abilities, and those of the team he has assembled, than the venture firm."
Thiel and other partners invest substantial amounts of their own money in the fund. Thiel contributed $38 million to the Founders Fund's Fund 1 (2005). In 2023, Thiel invested $920 million (27%). By late 2018, the firm was returning $4.60 to its investors on every dollar invested. The industry average of that year was $2.11.
In October 2024, the Founders Fund hosted the invite-only "Hereticon: Apocalypse Ball", an event they described as "a conference for thoughtcrime", to display and celebrate "technologies and projects so ambitious, they will ultimately transform our world for the better – or destroy it". The invitation reads, "Maybe if you are not trying to destroy the world, you are not trying hard enough".
The firm has a longtime rivalry with one of Thiel's other venture companies, Mithril Capital.
Office in Miami In 2021, the Founders Fund opened a Miami office.
Founders Fund, the venture studio Atomic (a Thiel-backed firm, founded by Jack Abraham) and their joint venture Opendoor (founded by Rabois and Abraham) share the same building in Wynwood.
Editor James Thorne of Pitchbook write that Miami Techweek (2021) was "tweeted into existence by venture capitalists Keith Rabois and Delian Asparouhov of San Francisco’s Founders Fund, with help from other notable transplants like David Blumberg of Blumberg Capital." The event marked "an informal experiment to see if a critical mass of money and hype could boost Miami from a startup laggard to a leader," and coincided with the opening or expanding of offices and expansion of activity by funds like Point72 Ventures, Thoma Bravo, G Squared, Blackstone and Softbank.
Saxon Baum of Florida Funders, described by Miami Herald as the top venture investor in Florida, said that his firm has done deals with Founders Fund, Softbank and Khosla to help these large funds work with the Florida ecosystem.
Founders Fund has invested in companies based in Miami and Florida like Lula, Hydra Host, and Traba.
The expansion of Founders Fund in Miami is also discussed in media in connection with Thiel's growing presence in Miami (he has a personal residence there since 2020, Thiel Capital opened an office in late 2025, Palantir moved to Miami from Denver in 2026).
Personnel
Founders
Ken Howery, co-founder and former partner, was also a co-founder of PayPal and the Founders Fund's first chief financial officer. At the Founders Fund, he led or co-led investments in Facebook, Quantcast, ZocDoc and Geni. He is now a diplomat, having served as the U.S. ambassador to Sweden, and has been confirmed by the Senate as the next U.S. ambassador to Denmark In his college years, he was the editor-in-chief of The Stanford Review, a student newspaper found by Thiel.
In 2017, Luke Nosek, one of the co-founders, left the Founders Fund to establish Gigafund, which focuses on space technology and Musk companies like Neuralink and the Boring Company (initially it mainly focused on SpaceX). The other Gigafund co-founder, Stephen Oskoui, is also a former Founders Fund investor. When at Founders Fund. Nosek led the investment in SpaceX and remains a board member ever since. Nosek was instrumental in the investment, at a time SpaceX was vulnerable. Thiel was persuaded, partly out of the desire to mend his personal relationship with Musk due to previous problems at PayPal (Thiel had also previously refused to invest in Tesla – Musk thinks it was because of his skepticism of climate change].
Current personnel By April 2025, Peter Thiel, Napoleon Ta and Trae Stephens are listed as fund directors.
Currently the sole female partner is Lauren Gross, also the COO, who leads all non-investment activities from legal to finance.
Trae Stephens, also a partner, has played an important role in co-founding and developing companies incubated at the Founders Fund, including Anduril Industries (where he is now chairman), Sol (at one point Sindarin Inc.), which develops a wearable e-reader, Varda Space Industries (co-founder, alongside Thiel fellow Delian Asparouhov and former SpaceX engineer Will Bruey; also director), and Valinor Enterprises. In 2024, he co-founded Valinor alongside former Palantir's senior vice president Julie Bush (CEO), General Catalyst's Paul Kwan and Red Cell's Grant Verstandig. The team is sourced from Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries and Helsing. The firm also holds strategic relationships with these companies. Valinor participates in Anduril's Lattice Partner Program, and the two companies are also members of the Defense Industrial Base Consortium. Stephens also sits on the board of Flexport (he led the Founders Fund's investment in the company). Stephens had initially worked for Palantir. Alex Karp, the CEO, told him that he would not let Stephens meet Thiel because he would be poached from Palantir. Karp managed to keep the two separated for two years, until 2012. Stephens began to work for the Founders Fund in 2013. The Founders Fund's $1 billion investment in Anduril's 2025 Series G is the fund's largest investment in history, and the $2.5 billion collected in total was the second largest sum invested in a defense company in 2025, only behind the aerospace company's $2.6 billion Series E.
Ryan Petersen of Flexport is a partner. In 2016, reacting to Peter Thiel's support for Trump, Petersen said that he regretted to have accepted investment from the Founders Fund. In 2023, he decided to join the fund though.