OpenAI-backed Thrive Holdings raises $2B to expand AI-driven business buyouts

Thrive Holdings has raised $2 billion in new funding at a $12 billion valuation from investors including SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital, the New York Times first reported. The firm operates like a private equity company for AI, buying traditional businesses — so far mostly accounting and IT firms — and implementing AI into their workflows. Part of Wednesday’s raise will go toward expanding into a new vertical focused on physical assets.

Thrive Holdings is a spinout of Thrive Capital, one of OpenAI’s major investors, and its relationship with OpenAI is central to its strategy. In December 2025, OpenAI took an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, with part of the deal involving OpenAI sending employees to work directly with Thrive’s portfolio companies to accelerate AI adoption. That hands-on model has become a business in its own right, which may help explain investor enthusiasm for the raise — OpenAI and Anthropic have each separately partnered with large private equity firms to launch similar billion-dollar ventures, The Deployment Company and Ode with Anthropic, respectively.

The raise follows demonstrated results across Thrive’s more than 70 portfolio businesses. Its accounting arm, Current, spans more than 50 firms and 2,000 professionals; its IT arm, Shield, covers around 20 companies. Current’s self-improving tax agents, TaxAI, have processed more than 7,000 tax returns at 98% accuracy, cutting tax-prep times at participating firms by more than 30%, according to Thrive. Shield’s AI products have sped up help-desk resolution times by 36x, and the number of custom AI agents deployed on the platform doubled in the past month alone.

Part of the new funding will launch a third platform focused on regulatory services for the built environment. “The U.S. needs to build and modernize more critical infrastructure, but projects are often constrained by local, technical, and regulatory complexity,” Anuj Mehndiratta, a founding member of Thrive Holdings, told TechCrunch. “This applies across data centers, manufacturing, healthcare, power, water, transportation, and other physical infrastructure.”

Why it matters

Thrive’s model — buying unglamorous, fragmented businesses and layering in AI rather than building software to sell them — is emerging as a distinct AI-enterprise playbook alongside OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s own embedded-engineer ventures, betting that adoption, not model quality, is the bottleneck.