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The Takeaway

Some of the biggest backers of OpenAI and its rivals are pooling their money in an offshoot of Thrive Capital that buys controlling stakes in accounting and other services firms and aims to transform them with AI.

Thrive Holdings, a one-year-old holding company started by OpenAI investor Thrive Capital, is raising around $2 billion from investors including Altimeter, D1 Capital Partners and SoftBank, according to a person familiar with the fundraising. It’s the first time outside investors have put money into the holding company. It previously raised $1 billion from existing institutional backers of Thrive Capital, the venture firm founded by Josh Kushner.

Thrive Capital has about $50 billion in assets under management, ranking it among the largest venture capital firms.

The planned financing will give the three AI investors another way to benefit from increased business spending on the technology. SoftBank has committed to invest more than $64 billion in OpenAI. Altimeter and D1 have backed both OpenAI and Anthropic.

Those AI rivals are aggressively pursuing the IT budgets of companies and have introduced tools targeting specific industries. Earlier this year, OpenAI and Anthropic both set up separate joint ventures with private equity firms and consultancies to place applied AI engineers inside companies and help them integrate AI into their workflows.

Thrive Holdings typically takes controlling stakes in companies that have purchased smaller services businesses, which the holding company revamps with AI tools. The owners of the rolled-up firms retain “meaningful equity” in their companies, allowing them to benefit from the AI-enabled growth of their businesses, Kushner said in a June blog post. The initiative is part of a wave of firms loosely modeled on conglomerates like Constellation Software that have pursued roll-ups of traditional businesses, intending to transform them with AI.

OpenAI late last year took a stake in Thrive Holdings and is providing researchers as well as product and engineering talent for the initiative. Boris Power, OpenAI’s head of applied research, also works for Thrive Holdings in a joint role.

Last year, Thrive Holdings invested in Current, formerly called Crete Professionals Alliance, which has said it purchased 48 accounting firms it is overhauling with AI.

Thrive Holdings then works to modernize the businesses with AI tools. For example, employees from Thrive and OpenAI say they co-built a tax-return processing agent with OpenAI’s coding agent, Codex, which Current uses. Anuj Mehndiratta, a partner at Thrive Capital and Thrive Holdings, told Reuters in December that the firm’s partnership with the ChatGPT maker doesn’t preclude the initiative from using other AI models, including open-source ones, where it makes sense for the business.