Thrive Capital Creating Vehicle for Serial M&A

Thrive Capital has bet big on artificial intelligence, including emerging giants of the field like OpenAI and Databricks.

Now the venture capital firm is taking a different approach: creating and buying companies that it believes can benefit from A.I. — including in industries that seem far more humdrum, such as accounting — and holding on to them for a long time.

Thrive is raising money for a company it has created called Thrive Holdings, which is meant to develop and buy start-ups, according to four people with knowledge of the matter. The idea is to help operate the businesses, and use the cash flow to both invest in the companies and buy up others.

The firm is in the late stages of closing about $1 billion for Thrive Holdings’ initial round of funding, according to one of the people with knowledge of the matter. The first investors include Thrive’s existing group of backers, including pension funds and endowments.

But because Thrive Holdings is essentially being set up as a permanent capital vehicle, it can keep raising money over the years, these people said.

In many ways, it’s an unusual bet by Thrive. The firm, which was founded in 2010 by Joshua Kushner, made its name betting on fast-growing, and soon-to-be-prominent start-ups, including Instagram, the payment processor Stripe and Kim Kardashian’s Skims.