FF
Founders Fund
Venture capital firm · Founded 2005 · Active in 2026
Founders Fund was founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek — three of the original PayPal mafia. The contrarian thesis — "we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" — has driven heavy concentration in deep tech and frontier categories: space, defence, AI infrastructure, and crypto.
Signature bets include SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Stripe, and an early position in Facebook.
The 130 Founders Fund Power Law outcomes ($100M+ revenue or $1B+ valuation).
Snapshot of where the outcomes are concentrated by country, sector, and stage entered.
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USA110
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UK4
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Germany3
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Canada2
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New Zealand2
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Brazil1
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Senegal1
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Australia1
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India1
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Sweden1
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Norway1
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Netherlands1
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Fintech28
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Health Tech & Medtech15
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AI12
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Other B2B Software11
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Biotech & Life Sciences11
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Cybersecurity8
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Other8
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eCommerce & Marketplaces8
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Transportation7
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Marketing5
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Space5
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Energy5
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Series B+69
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Series A30
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Seed26
Founders Fund's 130 Power Law outcomes.
Where Founders Fund's founders come from — and where they study.
388 founders across the 130 Power Law outcomes — split by country of origin, university attended, and the company they worked at before founding. Stanford University and Alphabet | Google are the deepest single pipelines.
Key people at Founders Fund.
How does Founders Fund stack up?
Founders Fund in orange, your selection in blue and other colours. Pick from the global roster of 34 peer investors — scope by startup location or hit "Find similar shapes" to auto-pick the three closest. The funnel matrix mirrors the spider chart on the ranking page; the line chart shows each firm's share of unicorns minted in the selected startup location — peaks reveal vintage years.
Share of new unicorns per year
% of global unicorns minted that year, year by year · hover the chart to see which unicornsStage focus
Companies by entry stage and outcome tierSector focus
Companies per investor across the 10 highest-volume sectorsSentiment on X
What X is saying about Founders Fund
An AI-synthesized read of the highest-engagement posts about Founders Fund on X over the past 7 days. We rank by likes & retweets, ignore corporate channels, and surface the themes that broke out from real people.
Reading the room on X — pulling top posts and synthesizing themes…
Source: X recent search ranked by engagement (likes + retweets) · Synthesis by Claude · Cached for 1 hour
In the news
Latest news about Founders Fund
Recent press, funding announcements, and portfolio moves mentioning Founders Fund — pulled live from Dealroom's news feed.
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