Thrive Holdings, the one-year-old holding company started by Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner, has raised $2 billion in new funding at a $12 billion valuation — its first round with outside investors. SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners and Altimeter Capital are among the backers, all of them heavyweights in the AI investment boom: SoftBank has committed more than $64 billion to OpenAI, while Altimeter and D1 have backed both OpenAI and Anthropic.
The deal deepens the unusually tight bond between Thrive and OpenAI. OpenAI took a stake in the holding company late last year and supplies researchers plus product and engineering talent. Boris Power, OpenAI's head of applied research, holds a joint role at Thrive. Employees from both companies say they co-built a tax-return processing agent using OpenAI's coding agent Codex, now used by Current, a Thrive portfolio company that has acquired 48 accounting firms.
Thrive's model resembles a private-equity roll-up: it typically acquires controlling stakes in companies that have themselves bought up smaller services businesses — accounting, IT, infrastructure — and then revamps those firms with AI tools. The founders of the rolled-up companies keep meaningful equity, Kushner has said. The strategy echoes Constellation Software and Milan's Bending Spoons, which owns AOL, Vimeo and Eventbrite and applies a similar buy-and-rebuild playbook.
Observers see Thrive as a test bed for one of the most contested questions in the AI economy: whether AI can genuinely transform legacy services businesses rather than merely add a chatbot layer. OpenAI has separately pushed into enterprises through vehicles like its Accenture partnership, which rolled ChatGPT Enterprise out to tens of thousands of consultants.
With AI infrastructure spending hitting record levels — North American startups raised roughly $392 billion in the first half of 2026 — investors are increasingly betting on the demand side of the equation. Thrive's $2 billion round is one of the largest yet dedicated to buying traditional businesses and rewiring them for the agentic era.
