Disruptive

Venture Capital · Artificial Intelligence · Defense Tech

Milestone

Disruptive closes $10B flagship fund for AI and defense bets

It marks the firm's shift from deal-by-deal SPVs to discretionary control over which startups get its billion-dollar checks.

• Dallas-based investment firm Disruptive closed a $10 billion flagship fund, its first blind-pool vehicle, to back roughly 10 late-stage AI, defense, and software startups with checks up to $1 billion each.
• Founded in 2012 by Alex Davis, Disruptive has backed Palantir, Airbnb, Spotify, Groq, Databricks, ElevenLabs, Helsing, and Shield AI.
• The fund replaces Disruptive's 14-year practice of raising special-purpose vehicles deal by deal, letting the firm now invest at its own discretion from a single pooled vehicle.
• Founder Alex Davis said founders had grown wary of anonymous SPVs: "The best companies in the world are basically picking who they want to have invest in them," he told Bloomberg.
• The new fund roughly doubles Disruptive's total assets under management; the firm has told LPs it returned over $6 billion on about $1.9 billion previously invested.
• According to the Dallas Business Journal, the $10 billion vehicle is the largest venture capital fund ever raised in Texas.
• Davis plans to deploy the fund into about 10 companies over the next 18 months, mostly into new primary rounds with some purchases of existing shareholders' stakes.
• The megafund underscores how capital-intensive AI and defense startups have made billion-dollar checks the new normal for late-stage investors, joining similar scale-ups at Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.