New York’s Thrive Capital closes its eighth fund with a whopping $3bn

Thrive Capital, the venture firm founded in 2009 by a then 25-year-old Joshua Kushner, says it has closed its eighth fund with approximately $3bn in capital commitments, $500m of which it plans to invest in early-stage startups and another $2.5bn that it has earmarked for later-stage companies.

The announcement comes almost a year to the day that Thrive took the wraps off its seventh fund, which it closed with $2 billion. Similarly, the idea with that fund was to plug $500m into early-stage startups, and $1.5bn into later-stage companies. The young outfit says it is now managing roughly $16bn in assets across all of its funds.

Given that many firms are adopting a survival-of-the-biggest type mentality, the capital raise isn’t entirely shocking. Thrive has wedged its way into a lot of companies that have become big brands, too, including Instagram, Jet, Unity, Airtable, Affirm, Robinhood, Benchling, Spotify, GitHub, Slack, Gong, Hims, Fanatics, Plaid and Ramp.

Get the week’s top news delivered directly to your inbox – Sign up for our newsletter

Perhaps most notably, Thrive has a meaningful stake in the payments giant Stripe, where a former general partner at Thrive, Will Gaybrick, wrote a $30m check to the company in 2014 — at the time Thrive’s biggest investment ever — and who later joined the startup full time.

Last fall, according to the WSJ, Thrive also joined numerous other venture firms in becoming a registered investment advisor, a move that gives it more flexibility than traditional venture firms are allowed, including to invest more aggressively in both public stocks and crypto tokens as it sees fit.

In a press statement, the firm didn’t disclose its backers, though earlier investors in Thrive’s funds include Princeton University, Hall Capital Partners, Wellcome Trust and Peter Thiel. Of course, Kushner’s brother, Jared, is famously the son-in-law of former U.S. President Donald Trump, and the Kushner brothers are just as famously the sons of another real estate developer, Charles Kushner. (They have connections, in short.)

According to LinkedIn, Thrive now employs roughly 55 people, including general partners Kareem Zaki, who joined Thrive in 2014, and Jared Weinstein, who joined in 2011.

Another former general partner with the firm, Miles Grimshaw, was recruited away by Benchmark in late 2020.

Thrive has seen other partners come and go, including Chris Paik, who reportedly led deals in Twitch and Patreon while at Thrive and who left in 2018 to co-found his own firm, Pace Capital.

Some of the most recent checks to come out of Thrive went to Homebound, a tech-enabled home-building startup that just this week raised $75 million in fresh funding. (Thrive was a repeat investor.)

Can’t stop reading? Read more