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Founders Fund

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Founders Fund

VC Fund 📍 United States, North America

About Founders Fund

Founders Fund is a San Francisco-based (Letterman Digital Arts Center) venture capital firm founded in July 2005 by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek — all early PayPal alumni. The firm manages approximately $17 billion in assets as of 2025 and has become known for a distinctly contrarian, "hard tech" investment identity, having expanded from primarily early-stage venture investing into late-stage and growth deals from 2019 onward, deploying increasingly large checks per company in its later funds. It opened a Miami office in 2021 and has made a growing number of investments in European and Asian startups.

Founders Fund's portfolio spans SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries, Facebook, Airbnb, Spotify, Stripe, Neuralink, and DeepMind, reflecting a shift over time from consumer internet bets toward defense technology, space, semiconductors, biotech, and artificial intelligence. It has been described as having perhaps the most formidable defense-technology portfolio in Silicon Valley. No Philippines-specific investment activity was confirmed from available sources.

Investment Thesis

Founders Fund is explicitly contrarian, seeking out ambitious, technically difficult "hard tech" bets — defense, space, semiconductors, biotech, and AI infrastructure — that it believes are undervalued relative to more fashionable consumer-software investing, famously summarized by partner Peter Thiel's line that the firm "wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." It writes checks from early through growth/late stage in its highest-conviction companies.

Portfolio Companies

SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries, Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe