Founders Fund

Founders Fund is a venture capital firm started by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, Keith Rabois and Luke Nosek. Ken Howery is now ambassador to Denmark under President Trump, and part of Network State-related efforts to purchase Greenland for venture capitalists. About 20% of capital invested by Founders Fund comes from its own partners, already very wealthy, which means much of the returns stay within the organization and its players.

Founders Fund has over $17 billion in assets under management (AUM). Most recently, it raised $4.6 billion in the first half of 2025, the largest amount raised by any VC firm in the cycle. Founders Fund has funding from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund through its venture arm, Sanabil Investments. In June 2025, Founders Fund contributed $1 billion to a funding round for weapons company Anduril.

Founders Fund has a manifesto posted on their website with their market analysis, arguing that venture capital must move away from the consumer, mobile and social web and towards hardware, space development, genetics, energy, weapons and defense. Like other top VC firms, Founders Fund acknowledges how changes in venture capital are being driven by financial crisis across much of venture capital as an asset class. Quoted at length for illustrative value, the manifesto states:

"VC has ceased to be the funder of the future, and instead has become a funder of features, widgets, irrelevances. In large part, it also ceased making money, as the bottom half of venture produced flat to negative return for the past decade..."

On space and transportation:

"We have not been back to the moon since 1972 and with the final Shuttle flight in 2011, the US will be without the ability to send a person into orbit for the first time since it began its manned space program... SpaceX appears to be on track to reduce costs by that order of magnitude, which would make it an enormously valuable company in its own right. If it succeeds, there should at last be plenty to do in space, from telecommunications to power generation to high-precision microgravity fabrication – if investors with cash are ready to fund that innovation...

... Cheaper, faster transportation has been a major lubricator of trade and wealth creation. For almost two centuries, technology has improved transportation relentlessly. Unfortunately, over the past thirty years, there have been no radical advances in transportation technology....”

On biotech and human medical testing:

"... there are presently three major and related obstacles facing biotechnology (or biotechnology investment at any rate): lack of data, capital intensity, and a medieval approach to therapeutic discovery. The first major problem is that genetic sequencing, which provides us with the body of knowledge we require to create genomic therapies, is extremely slow, expensive, and inaccurate. Present methods of sequencing (which use fluorescence) can only sequence about 95% of larger genomes, take forever to do so, and cost a fortune. The second problem is capital intensity: it simply takes far too much time and money before a company has any real indication that a drug might work with animal/human trials fantastically expensive despite the help of computer modeling. The final problem is an extremely slow drug discovery process: fundamentally, discovery still proceeds by enlightened guesswork, rather than as a disciplined process – and there is no good way for investigators to share data. Biotechnology companies that can overcome these stumbling blocks will create enormous value for their investors and society..."

On artificial intelligence and AGI:

"True general artificial intelligence represents the highest form of computing. Whether and when a general artificial intelligence arrives is less critical for the near future than whether we are able to create machines that can replicate components of human intelligence -- as we are now doing reasonably well with voice recognition and hopefully will be able to do with visual pattern recognition. At a higher level, machine learning also represents another compelling opportunity, with the potential to create everything from more intelligent game AIs to Watson. While we have the computational power to support many versions of AI, the field remains relatively poorly funded, a surprising result given that the development of powerful AIs (even if they aren’t general AIs) would probably be one of the most important and lucrative technological advances in history."

On energy:

"... A lot of money has poured into clean technologies. Investments that have focused on efficiency improvements have done well as a financial matter, but investments in alternative technologies for actually generating energy have not produced particularly good returns...

What we need are companies developing sources of energy that are as good as, or better than, conventional sources at lower prices and at scale. Unfortunately, relatively few companies research such sources, preferring instead incremental improvements on long-established alternative technologies (wind, solar) whose physical limitations mean they cannot satisfy these requirements. But there is no reason to believe that we can’t invent an alternative to alternatives... "

Finally, the investment thesis:

"So we need to invest in at least some ambitious companies – but how many? Our answer is that substantially all of the capital in our portfolio should be directed to companies with audacious vision seeking enormous markets.... Investing in companies doing things that are breathtakingly new and ambitious is provocative. It is not what our industry is best at doing, at least, not in the past decade. And there is no way to assure a positive return – but at least it has a chance of working. Simply doing what everyone else does is not enough... We do believe that our method should outperform, and we also believe it’s the shortest route to social value."

The manifesto captures a fundamental shift happening in the dominant players in the industry: a move into major industrial projects, more expensive projects requiring greater up-front capital, projects that give venture capitalists increasing ownership and control of major infrastructure, and promise returns never seen by venture capital prior.

Founders Fund is a huge player in the defense and weapons space, funding Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX, Flock Safety, Varda Space Industries and others. They are also investors in the new venture capital financial system, funding Stripe, Affirm, Credit Karma, Polymarket and Paxos, as well as Nubank, a fintech company targeting Latin America. They invest in biotech startups, including Neuralink. Other notable investments include DeepMind, Oculus and OpenAI. More of their investments can be found on their portfolio page and on Crunchbase.