Founders Fund
Founded in 2005 by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek, Founders Fund is a San Francisco based venture capital firm known for its contrarian investment philosophy focused on revolutionary technologies and hard scientific breakthroughs. The firm was the first institutional investor in SpaceX and Palantir Technologies, and an early backer of Facebook. Its portfolio includes notable companies such as Airbnb, Stripe, Anduril, Ramp, Neuralink, and Nubank. In 2025 the firm closed a $4.6 billion growth fund, its largest raise to date, signalling a shift towards concentrated late stage bets.
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2 companies in our directory
Anduril
HiringAnduril Industries is a defence technology company that builds autonomous systems and AI-powered platforms for national security applications. Founded in Irvine, California by Palmer Luckey (co-founder of Oculus VR) and former Palantir executives, Anduril takes a Silicon Valley approach to defence contracting, investing its own capital in R&D rather than relying on traditional cost-plus government contracts. Its core product, Lattice OS, is an open operating system that uses sensor fusion, computer vision, and machine learning to connect autonomous hardware across air, land, sea, and space domains. The company's portfolio includes autonomous drones (Ghost, Fury, Roadrunner), counter-UAS systems, and the Ghost Shark autonomous submarine. Anduril doubled its revenue to roughly $1 billion in 2024 and is building Arsenal-1, a major autonomous weapons manufacturing facility in Ohio.
DeepMind
HiringGoogle DeepMind is an AI research laboratory focused on building artificial general intelligence. Founded in London in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman, the company was acquired by Google in 2014 for approximately $660M. DeepMind pioneered breakthroughs including AlphaGo, the first program to defeat a world champion at Go, and AlphaFold, which solved the 50-year-old protein folding problem and has been used by over two million researchers worldwide. The lab remains headquartered in London with a large UK engineering presence and continues to push the boundaries of reinforcement learning, large language models, and scientific AI.