Peter Thiel's venture capital firm has raised more than $5 billion across two new funds after participating in a record-breaking number of rounds last year.
Founders Fund invested in 134 rounds in 2021, its most in a single year since opening shop in 2005, according to PitchBook.
The new capital will be used for investments across early- and late-stage investments with $1.9 billion allocated for its Founders Fund 8 and $3.4 billion for its Growth 2 fund, according to Bloomberg News.
Partner Lauren Gross told Bloomberg News that a good chunk of the funding will go towards doubling and tripling down on its current portfolio which, according to PitchBook, includes many Bay Area companies such as Flexport, PsiQuantum, Forward, Scale AI, Rippling, Neuralink, Niantic, Lattice, Quince and Bungalow.
Thiel's Trump connections and advocacy for conservative and libertarian causes has not appeared to have hindered companies in the contrastively liberal Bay Area from taking money connected to the billionaire.
Several of its portfolio companies have gone public, too, including Airbnb, Affirm, Asana, Nubank, Oscar, Palantir and Wish.
This year Thiel is also stepping down from the board of Meta, Facebook's parent company, after serving as a director since 2005. He reportedly intends to now spend time helping pro-Trump candidates get elected in the upcoming midterm elections, particularly Senate candidates Blake Masters in Arizona and J.D. Vance in Ohio, according to Reuters.
He also left Silicon Valley and relocated both his home and personal investment firms to LA in 2018, according to a WSJ report at the time which also indicated that he was already thinking about leaving Facebook's board, though he ended up staying for a few more years.
Founders Fund is still based in San Francisco and has an additional office in Miami.
Thiel famously attended the Republican National Convention in 2016 and told the crowd, "I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican." He also funded a lawsuit against Gawker which helped wrestler Hulk Hogan (who's real name is Terry Bollea) win a $140 million judgement against the media company in 2016 over invasion of privacy for publishing a sex tape. Gawker outed Thiel as gay in 2007, and his funding of the lawsuit was widely perceived as revenge against their reporting.
