Khosla Ventures in Talks to Raise $5.5 Billion in New Funds

Vinod Khosla, founder and partner of Khosla Ventures

Early OpenAI backer Khosla Ventures is discussing raising as much as $5.5 billion for its latest set of venture investment funds, a haul that would amount to its largest fundraising event in its two-decade history, according to people familiar with the matter.

In its newest funds, Khosla Ventures would dedicate a majority of the capital to its core investment area: very young startups. The firm is considering raising around $1 billion for seed-stage startups and approximately $2 billion to venture — or early-stage — startups. The firm has discussed raising around $2.5 billion for its opportunity fund, which will back more mature startups, according to two people familiar with the matter. The size of each fund could still change as fundraising discussions continue, according to the people, who asked to be anonymous because the talks are private.

The firm’s last set of funds was around a $4 billion fundraise last year, according to one of those people. A spokesperson for Khosla Ventures declined to comment.

The early fundraising discussions show how the success of early investments in transformational AI technology have emboldened venture firms to take bigger swings now, in the hope of replicating that success. Khosla joins a stampede of firms that are looking at raising their largest funds of all time, many of whom were early to bet on OpenAI or Anthropic.

For example, last month, Menlo Ventures raised $3 billion in its largest-ever haul. The firm has a roughly $14 billion stake in Anthropic after investing around $1 billion across several rounds, Bloomberg previously reported. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund also recently closed on $6 billion, the largest for the firm, partly in response to the growing demand from more mature startups to raise unprecedented sums of capital. And this year, Sequoia Capital, one of the largest and most prominent venture capital firms, raised about $7 billion for a new fund for investing in latest stage startups.

Tech billionaire Vinod Khosla founded the Menlo Park-based Khosla Ventures in 2004 and continues to run the firm. It was the first outside investor in OpenAI, and has since seeded a set of other high-profile AI bets, including Cognition, the AI coding startup; Sakana AI, which is building a language model for Japan; and Physical Intelligence, which is building models for the robotics sector.

Recently, Khosla personally led an investor group to buy the Seattle Seahawks for $9.6 billion, a deal that if closed would be expected to set a National Football League record. On a recent fundraising call, investors were told that Khosla has no intention of running the Seahawks and is dedicated to his venture investing business, according to people familiar with the matter.