Big Wins for Two of Venture's Most Envied Firms: $10 Billion for Thrive & an Altman for Benchmark
Plus, regulators battle over prediction markets & Wired panned for 'gay mafia' story
The Week in Short
Thrive raises a $10 billion fund while Benchmark hires Jack Altman and his firm. Jeremy Levine talks SaaS vs. AI on the podcast. Video game investing has plummeted as Roblox dominates. Fei-Fei Li’s physical-world AI startup raises $1 billion. Anthropic faces off with the Pentagon over AI safety limits. CFTC chair Michael Selig declares sovereignty over prediction markets, but states aren’t having it. Wired whiffs on Silicon Valley ‘gay mafia’ probe.
The Main Item
Concentrated Bets Pay Off for Thrive With New $10 Billion Fund
Two of the cool-kids of venture made big moves this week: Thrive Capital, run by the ultra-insider Joshua Kushner, raised $10 billion — and Benchmark, the small-but-storied firm, made its second big hire after some partner turnover had us nervous about the firm’s footing.
Thrive announced its largest fund to date Tuesday, with $10 billion in fresh capital — a haul that puts it behind a16z, which raised $15 billion in January, but ahead of Lightspeed’s recent $9 billion fund and General Catalyst’s $8 billion raise in 2024.
Thrive’s portfolio is the envy of many in Silicon Valley, with major stakes in OpenAI, Stripe, Databricks, Cursor, and Anduril.
Thrive’s core approach is making large, focused bets that are few and far between; the firm only backs a dozen or so new startups a year. The investing team is small — outside of founder and CEO Joshua Kushner, the only other investment partners are Kareem Zaki, Miles Grimshaw, Vince Hankes, and Philip Clark.
Thrive is known recently for its growth investing, but nearly half its deals last year were first-check rounds. In the AI boom cycle those early rounds are often over-sized and can turn into growth rounds quickly: Thrive’s recent funds have seen positive ARR growth almost immediately thanks to sharp valuation hikes on its AI bets.
It’s also about to cash in on Google’s $32 billion purchase of Wiz, set to close next month after EU regulators approved the deal. Other exits in the last year include The Browser Company’s sale to Atlassian for $610 million, Jony Ive’s io’s merger with OpenAI, and a 4x return on its share sale of Carvana stock.
The new fund is broken down into a $1 billion vehicle for early deals and $9 billion for growth deals — double the size of its 9th fund from 2024. That should come in handy in an era where billion-dollar rounds are increasingly the norm.
Thrive, based in New York rather than the Bay Area, also builds in areas that some wouldn’t consider venture. They have backed public companies, incubated their own startups, and allocated over $1 billion to Thrive Holdings to make bets in the AI roll-up space.
With Altman, Benchmark is Back to 5 GPs
Just six months ago, we were a little worried about Benchmark.
The firm’s storied partnership of equals was down to just three members. Miles Grimshaw had decamped to Thrive, Victor Lazarte had left announcing that he was raising his own fund, and Sarah Tavel had shifted to venture partner. The firm really needed to get it right with its next partner hires.
In October, the firm hired Everett “Ev” Randle, a widely respected up-and-coming investor from Kleiner Perkins.
This week, Benchmark hired the second-most famous Altman brother, Jack Altman. Benchmark is apparently bringing Altman’s entire firm Alt Capital into the fold at Benchmark.
We suggested that Benchmark needed to recruit a partner that fit Altman’s profile back in August. We wrote:
Benchmark has sustained its reputation by pulling the best general partners out of established firms. To really succeed in this era Benchmark needs to figure out how to land the type of general partner who could start their own fund in the prime of their career.
And in the same fell swoop, Benchmark solved another problem we identified for the firm by hiring the brother of the most powerful foundation model startup in the world.
We wrote in August:
The firm isn’t an investor in OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, or any of the other major foundation model companies. That doesn’t just mean that it’s forgone the heady markups and secondary sale opportunities in AI juggernauts. It also means that the firm isn’t closely allied with one of the AI giants who could buy its portfolio companies or give it early insights into where the technology is headed.
(It’s hard to miss that it seems like a week of family dynasties with Kushners and Altmans taking the tippy top ranks of venture.)
There was never any doubt that Benchmark is able to perform for limited partners. Bloomberg recently added another proof point reporting that Benchmark’s 2020 fund is now worth more than 10 times what investors first put in.
The question is with fresh, well-connected blood can Benchmark reclaim the Silicon Valley cultural zeitgeist it once held when its partners were board members at Uber, WeWork, and Snap, defining companies of that era? Or will a firm like Thrive, which is dishing out far more capital with a select set of partners, simply overwhelm it?
With Altman’s hiring, Benchmark finally has one tool every good venture firm seems to need these days to maintain its profile: a podcast.
Newcomer Podcast
Jeremy Levine on AI Hype, Market Cycles & Playing the Long Game
How does one of the most established venture capital firms in the world think about the so called “SaaS apocalypse”?
Jeremy Levine of Bessemer Venture Partners joins the Newcomer Podcast to discuss the SaaS repricing, the acceleration of AI, whether SaaS is broken or simply reset after years of excess, and why AI companies are scaling faster than anything we have seen before.
Two Big Charts
Private Funding to Video Game Industry Slips as Roblox Dominates
The recreational game industry is a large one that we haven’t covered much here at Newcomer. The sector raised billions in private equity and VC funding back in the boom times of 2021, but as Matthew Ball shows in his extremely thorough Epyllion report on the state of the industry, VCs haven’t been so hot on the category as of late.
Early-stage private funding for game content-makers fell 55% in 2025, and didn’t even crack $1 billion. In 2021, gaming startups landed $1.3 billion in Q3 alone.
However, the online metaverse game Roblox has seen incredible growth. It accounted for 60% of net sales growth for the recreational gaming industry outside of China last year as well as 4.5% of total game spending.