Thrive Holdings Raises $2 Billion to Scale AI Integration Across Enterprise Sectors

OpenAI-backed Thrive Holdings raises $2B to bring AI to the enterprise

Thrive Holdings has raised $2 billion in new funding at a $12 billion valuation from investors like SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital. Thrive Holdings is akin to a private equity firm for AI, buying traditional businesses like accounting firms and implementing AI into their workflows. So far, Thrive has focused on accounting and information technology, but part of Wednesday's raise will go towards expanding a new vertical in physical assets. Key to that strategy is Thrive's close relationship with OpenAI. The New York Times was first to report the news. The firm is a spinout of Thrive Capital, one of OpenAI's major investors. In December 2025, OpenAI took an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings. Part of the deal involved OpenAI sending employees to work with Thrive's companies to accelerate AI adoption. That hands-on model of AI implementation has become a business in its own right, and may help explain investor enthusiasm behind Thrive's latest fundraise. OpenAI and Anthropic have both partnered with large private equity firms to launch The Deployment Company and Ode with Anthropic, respectively -- billion-dollar ventures that are building teams of elite engineers who embed themselves into enterprises and implement AI solutions into workflows. The raise comes off the back of proven success for Thrive's companies, which has surpassed 70 businesses on the Holdings platforms. The company has focused on two pillars to date: Current, its accounting arm with more than 50 firms and more than 2,000 professionals, and Shield, its information technology arm with around 20 companies on the platform. Current's self-improving tax agents, dubbed TaxAI, processed more than 7,000 tax returns at 98% accuracy, lowering tax prep times at participating firms by over 30%, according to Thrive. Meanwhile, Shield's AI products have sped up help desk resolution times by 36x, and the platform has doubled the number of custom AI agents deployed in the last month. Part of Wednesday's fundraise will help Thrive launch a third platform focused on regulatory services for the built environment, described by a spokesperson as: "the work required to get physical assets approved, built, certified, and kept in operation." "The U.S. needs to build and modernize more critical infrastructure, but projects are often constrained by local, technical, and regulatory complexity," Anuj Mehndiratta, a founding member of Thrive Holdings, told TechCrunch. "This applies across data centers, manufacturing, healthcare, power, water, transportation, and other physical infrastructure." That sort of complexity is where Thrive, well, thrives -- large, fragmented, mission-critical, and operationally complex. While Mehndiratta says AI won't replace field work, local judgement, or professional sign-off, it can help ease manual workflows like research, reporting, permit preparation, inspection documentation, and compliance tracking. "We think AI partnered with a lot of the experts and practitioners at these businesses can really help compress [regulatory bottlenecks], keep the safety standards high, but also be able to do it with less of a burden to the actual building of that and help it do it more efficiently, lower cost and do it faster," Kareem Zaki, a founding member of Thrive Holdings, said in a statement emailed to TechCrunch.

Thrive Holdings, A.I.-Focused Buyer of Service Firms, Raises $2 Billion

The DealBook Newsletter Our columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and his Times colleagues help you make sense of major business and policy headlines -- and the power-brokers who shape them. Get it sent to your inbox. For many financial firms, the most promising way to invest in artificial intelligence isn't through the labs that produce leading-edge models. It's through companies that seek ways to apply A.I. to real-world business uses. The latest beneficiary of that interest is Thrive Holdings, which buys up traditional service providers like accounting businesses and infuses them with A.I. The company said it planned to announce on Wednesday that it had raised $2 billion in new funding, valuing it at $12 billion. Investors in the round include SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners and Altimeter Capital. It's another sign that the more practical elements of the A.I. boom are gaining in prominence -- and drawing investor dollars. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have teamed up with big private equity firms on billion-dollar ventures that help their portfolio companies adopt A.I. tools. And it's a ratification of Thrive Holdings' strategy of buying or creating platforms in established industries and helping them to use A.I. in their businesses. The company was created last year by Thrive Capital, an investment firm founded by Joshua Kushner. In addition to being a venture capitalist, he's the brother of Jared Kushner, a son-in-law of President Trump. Thrive Capital has made significant bets on A.I. companies like OpenAI. (Thrive Holdings began with an initial $1 billion in funding, largely from existing Thrive Capital investors like pension funds and endowments.) Thrive Holdings has so far concentrated on two businesses: Current, which focuses on accounting, and Shield Technology Partners, which focuses on information technology. "We want to take A.I. from benchmarks and theoreticals and make contact with the real world," Kareem Zaki, a Thrive Capital partner who runs investment strategy at Thrive Holdings, said in an interview. That has meant creating a team of more than 20 A.I. engineers and product managers. Boris Power, the head of applied research at OpenAI, which took a stake in Thrive Holdings last year, is the head of research at the Thrive offshoot. The results of the approach are promising, according to Thrive Holdings: * Member firms of Current this tax season processed more than 7,000 returns and decreased their prep times by nearly a third. Current is now one of the 20 biggest U.S. accounting companies. * Firms associated with Shield have been able to resolve I.T. queries 36 times faster on average. * Overall, Thrive Holdings' platform is on track to surpass $1 billion in revenue. Thrive Holdings is now creating a third platform that's focused on navigating regulatory paperwork in the construction industry, such as permits and compliance tracking. Like Current and Shield, according to Mr. Zaki, it is a sector burdened with repetitive filings and other actions ripe for automation. Because Thrive Holdings is a so-called permanent capital vehicle, it faces no expiration date for the capital it collects from investors -- or pressure to sell its holdings. (The models, according to Mr. Zaki, are conglomerates like Berkshire Hathaway and Danaher.) But given the company's results, the management team saw the opportunity to raise more money to keep investing in Current and Shield and to build new platforms like the construction one, he said. The firm initially held discussions in the spring about raising money from existing investors, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who wasn't authorized to speak publicly about the discussions. It later expanded to new potential backers, including SoftBank, D1 and Altimeter, which have also bet heavily on A.I., this person added. The new fund-raising doesn't mean that Thrive Holdings intends to rapidly expand into new industries. "It's actually to go deep in the ones that are really working and double down or triple down," said Anuj Mehndiratta, a Thrive Capital partner who oversees Thrive Holdings' technology strategy.

Thrive Holdings raises $2bn at a $12bn valuation

The Thrive Holdings raise is $2bn at a $12bn valuation, and SoftBank is in it. Josh Kushner's firm does not sell AI software to companies. It buys the companies. Almost every AI business sells a product. Someone builds a model or a tool, licenses it, and hopes the customer works out what to do with it. Thrive Holdings inverts that. It buys accounting firms and IT services companies outright, puts its own engineers inside them, and rebuilds how the work gets done. It now owns more than 70 businesses. On Wednesday it said it had raised more than $2bn in new capital at a $12bn valuation. The New York Times reported it first. Total capital raised since inception now passes $3bn. The first outside money it has taken SoftBank Group, D1 Capital Partners and Altimeter Capital led the round. Until now Thrive Holdings had run on roughly $1bn in commitments from Thrive Capital's own institutional base, Tech Funding News reported. This is the first time outside investors have backed the vehicle. Kushner spun Thrive Holdings out of Thrive Capital in 2025. The parent firm is 16 years old, backs OpenAI, Stripe and SpaceX, and closed a $10bn fund in February. Read the spinout as a change of view rather than a side project. Kushner already owns pieces of the companies building AI. This vehicle buys the ones that will have to use it. SoftBank's presence carries its own signal. Masayoshi Son has said that calling AI a bubble is an insult. What the 70 businesses actually do Current is the accounting arm. It has grown to more than 50 firms and over 2,000 professionals. Shield is the IT arm, at around 20 companies. Neither category is glamorous, and that is the point. Thrive says it looks for markets that are large, fragmented, mission-critical and operationally complex. Accounting and IT support fit all four. The performance numbers are striking. Current's tax agents, branded TaxAI, have processed more than 7,000 returns at 98% accuracy and cut preparation time by over 30%. Shield says its tools have sped up help desk resolution by 36 times, and that custom agent deployments roughly doubled in the past month. Every one of those figures comes from Thrive. None is audited, and none has a published baseline. A 36-fold speed-up is a ratio without a starting number, and 98% accuracy on a tax return does not say what counts as a miss. The third platform is really about permits Part of the money funds a new vertical, and it is the most interesting line in the announcement. Thrive is going after the regulatory work behind physical assets, which means permits, inspections, technical documentation and compliance tracking. The targets it names are data centres, manufacturing, healthcare, power, water and transport. "The US needs to build and modernize more critical infrastructure, but projects are often constrained by local, technical, and regulatory complexity," founding member Anuj Mehndiratta told TechCrunch. That constraint is real, and it is getting worse. More than 500 US towns now restrict or ban data centres. Kareem Zaki, another founding member, framed the pitch as compression. AI working alongside practitioners can "compress regulatory bottlenecks, keep the safety standards high, but also be able to do it with less of a burden", he said. Mehndiratta was careful about the limits, which is worth noting. AI will not replace field work, local judgement or professional sign-off, he said. OpenAI is inside the machine The relationship that makes this model work is not incidental. OpenAI took an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings in December 2025, and the deal sent OpenAI employees to work directly inside Thrive's portfolio companies. Thrive Capital is also one of OpenAI's largest backers. So OpenAI owns part of a company spun out of a firm that owns part of OpenAI. The AI economy keeps producing this shape. Lambda borrowed $917m to buy chips from a company that invests in it. SoftBank sits in the loop too. It is one of OpenAI's largest investors, and it has now bought into a business whose competitive edge is OpenAI staff on secondment. Three firms, one bet Thrive is not alone in this. OpenAI built DeployCo with TPG and Bain Capital, a joint venture worth $10bn. Anthropic built Ode with Blackstone. All three put engineers inside client organisations rather than selling licences. The wager is identical: the money is in implementation, not in the model. The roll-up version is spreading as well. Beacon raised $225m for an AI roll-up of its own. What separates Thrive is ownership. DeployCo and Ode work for their clients. Thrive owns them, so it keeps the margin instead of billing for it. None of this is European That is worth saying plainly. The announcement is about America, and Thrive says it wants to make it easier to modernise and build America's physical infrastructure. It names no European market at all. The model would travel. European accountancy and IT support are at least as fragmented as their American equivalents, and European permitting is not famously quick. What Europe lacks is the buyer. This requires a fund willing to purchase hundreds of small professional firms outright and then run them, which is a different animal from a venture fund writing cheques into startups. The number was public five months ago This raise surprised nobody who was reading. Tech Funding News reported in March that Thrive Holdings was in talks for "at least $2 billion". It closed in August at exactly that. The company's own announcement reads unusually for a startup. It carries a securities-style disclaimer warning that its statements are forward-looking and that "actual results may differ materially". That is the language of a firm that expects to be quoted back to itself. What would settle it Two things are checkable. The first is whether any operating number ever gets confirmed by a customer or an auditor rather than by the owner. The second is whether the permitting platform ships at all. Accounting and IT are workflows Thrive controls end to end, and it can rewrite them because it owns them. A permit is different. It is a decision made by somebody who does not work for Thrive, in a town that did not ask for a data centre, and no amount of compute changes who signs it.