Disruptive, the Dallas based investment firm whose past bets include Palantir, Airbnb and Spotify, said on Tuesday it has raised a $10 billion fund to back at least 10 late-stage companies, with individual cheques of up to $1 billion. The vehicle, the Disruptive Flagship Fund, will focus on artificial intelligence, AI infrastructure, defence technology and enterprise software.
The fund is the firm’s first blind pool vehicle: investors commit money without knowing which companies it will back. Since its founding in 2012 by Alex Davis, Disruptive had raised capital deal by deal through special purpose vehicles. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the firm was seeking to raise the fund and had by then secured at least $7.5 billion in commitments.
Bloomberg reported that the firm told limited partners it has returned more than $6 billion on the roughly $1.9 billion it has put into startups, and the Dallas Business Journal described the new vehicle as the largest venture fund raised in Texas history. Dealroom reported the capital came from sovereign wealth funds, endowments and universities, and that the fund roughly doubles the firm’s assets under management.
Concentrating $10 billion across about 10 companies leaves little room for error, but it matches the shape of the current market, in which private technology companies are staying private longer and raising rounds that once belonged to public markets. Disruptive’s current and past portfolio includes chip startup Groq, AI voice company ElevenLabs, Databricks and defence company Shield AI.