Thrive Holdings raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation, led by SoftBank, D1 Capital, and Altimeter

The company is applying AI to traditional businesses, using a private-equity-style model to acquire accounting and IT firms and embed AI into their workflows.

OpenAI holds a stake in Thrive Holdings and has embedded its own staff inside the firm’s acquisitions.

Joshua Kushner has spent 16 years building Thrive Capital into one of the most closely watched venture firms backing OpenAI, Stripe, and SpaceX. Now he sees the bigger opportunity is not backing the companies that build AI, but buying the ones that have to use it.

Thrive Holdings, the New York-based offshoot Kushner spun out of Thrive Capital in 2025, has raised $2 billion in new funding at a $12 billion valuation. SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital led the round, marking the first time outside investors have backed the venture, which had previously run on roughly $1 billion in commitments from Thrive Capital’s own institutional base.

“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,” said Kareem Zaki, a founding member of Thrive Holdings and partner at Thrive Capital.

A private equity firm that ships software instead of spreadsheets

Thrive Holdings does not build AI products and license them out. It buys the businesses first, then rewires how they work.

The model has focused so far on two unglamorous but sprawling categories: accounting and IT services. Its accounting platform, Current, has grown to more than 50 firms and 2,000 professionals. 

Its IT platform, Shield, spans around 20 companies. Together, more than 70 businesses now sit under Thrive Holdings’ umbrella. The firm says the results are already measurable. Current’s self-improving tax agents, TaxAI, have processed more than 7,000 returns at 98% accuracy, cutting preparation time by more than 30%, according to the company. 

Shield, meanwhile, claims its AI tools have cut IT help desk resolution times by 36 times, and that the number of custom agents deployed through the platform has roughly doubled, according to the company.

From accounting and IT to physical infrastructure

Part of the new capital is earmarked for a third platform, one aimed at the regulatory grind of physical infrastructure — the permits, inspections, technical documentation, and compliance work required to get data centres, manufacturing sites, healthcare facilities, and power and water infrastructure approved and built.

Anuj Mehndiratta, another founding member of Thrive Holdings and a Thrive Capital partner, has argued that the United States needs to build and modernise far more critical infrastructure, but that projects are routinely slowed by local, technical, and regulatory complexity/

It is a logical next step for a firm that first floated this exact raise back in March 2026, when Tech Funding News reported that Thrive Holdings was in talks to raise “at least $2 billion” to expand its AI-powered roll-up beyond IT and accounting. Five months on, the number has landed exactly where the early reporting pointed.

The OpenAI relationship is doing a lot of the work

None of this happens without Thrive Capital’s proximity to OpenAI. Thrive Capital has poured billions into OpenAI across multiple rounds, and in December 2025, OpenAI took a stake in Thrive Holdings, with the deal including OpenAI staff working directly within Thrive’s portfolio companies to speed up AI adoption. 

It also puts Thrive Holdings in the middle of a wider trend. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have partnered with major private equity firms on similar vehicles designed to embed AI expertise directly inside enterprises rather than simply sell software licences — OpenAI’s DeployCo, backed by TPG, Bain Capital, and other PE investors, follows a comparable playbook of placing engineers inside client organisations to automate workflows.

For Thrive Holdings, the $2 billion buys time to test whether the model holds up outside accounting and IT — infrastructure projects move slower, involve more regulators, and are far less forgiving of a bad AI agent than a tax return is. 

Kushner has already backed OpenAI, Stripe, and half the AI economy. This is a vision that only pays off if the unglamorous stuff, such as permits, help desks, and tax filings, gets easier because of it.