Vinod Khosla likes to be early. His firm was the first outside investor in OpenAI, back when that was a strange thing to be. Now Khosla Ventures is raising money to do it again, at a scale it has never tried.
The firm is in talks to gather as much as $5.5bn across a new set of funds, Bloomberg reported. People familiar with the private talks described the plans. That would be its largest raise in two decades. Its last set of funds, closed a year ago, came to around $4bn.
Most of the money would go where Khosla likes it: early. The plan floats about $1bn for seed-stage startups and roughly $2bn for slightly older ones. A further $2.5bn would form an “opportunity” fund for more mature companies.
Those are the ones now raising sums that once sounded absurd. A spokesperson declined to comment, and the figures could still move.
The number is big, but the pattern is the story. Firms that got into OpenAI or Anthropic early are now raising the biggest funds of their lives. Paper gains have emboldened them, and they are racing to repeat the trick.
A stampede of record funds #
The comparisons pile up. Last month Menlo Ventures closed a record $3bn, and it sits on a roughly $14bn stake in Anthropic. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund recently raised $6bn, its largest ever. Earlier this year Sequoia gathered about $7bn. Each is a wager that the AI boom still has room to run, as Outlook Business noted.
Khosla’s own bets sketch the thesis. Beyond OpenAI, the firm seeded Cognition, an AI coding startup, and Sakana AI, which builds a language model for Japan. It also backed Physical Intelligence, which trains models for robots. The idea is that the next OpenAI is already somewhere in that list.
The man, not the football team #
There was one other question on a recent fundraising call. Khosla had just led an investor group to buy the Seattle Seahawks for $9.6bn. That price would set a National Football League record.
On the call he assured investors he has no plans to run the team. He stays devoted to venture capital, Startup Fortune reported. That leaves the real question hanging over the raise. Can a firm catch the same lightning twice? Or is $5.5bn what the top of a market looks like?
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