Thrive Holdings has closed a $2 billion funding round that values the company at $12 billion. Investors in the round include SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital. The New York Times was first to report the fundraising.
Thrive operates like a private-equity-style vehicle for AI adoption: it acquires traditional firms—such as accounting practices and IT companies—and embeds artificial intelligence into their workflows. To date, the company has concentrated on accounting and information technology, but part of the new capital will be used to expand into a vertical focused on physical assets and the regulatory work around them.
A central element of Thrive’s strategy is its close relationship with OpenAI. Thrive is a spinout of Thrive Capital, which is one of OpenAI’s major investors. In December 2025, OpenAI took an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings; the deal included placing OpenAI employees with Thrive’s portfolio companies to accelerate on-the-ground AI adoption.
That hands-on model—sending expert engineers into businesses to implement AI—has become a distinct commercial approach and likely explains some investor enthusiasm. Similar partnerships have emerged elsewhere: OpenAI and Anthropic have each worked with large private equity firms to launch multibillion-dollar ventures (The Deployment Company and Ode with Anthropic, respectively) that build elite engineering teams to embed into enterprises and operationalize AI.
Results so far
Thrive’s platform now includes more than 70 businesses. The company has concentrated on two main pillars:
- Current: the accounting arm, which comprises over 50 firms and more than 2,000 professionals.
- Shield: the information technology arm, with roughly 20 companies on the platform.
According to Thrive, Current’s self-improving tax agents (branded as TaxAI) processed more than 7,000 tax returns with 98% accuracy, reducing tax-preparation times at participating firms by over 30%. Shield’s AI products accelerated help-desk resolution times by 36x, and the platform doubled the number of custom AI agents deployed in the past month.
Expanding into regulatory services for the built environment
Part of the new funding will be directed to launching a third platform focused on regulatory services for the built environment—defined by a spokesperson as the work required to get physical assets approved, built, certified, and kept in operation.
Anuj Mehndiratta, a founding member of Thrive Holdings, told TechCrunch that the U.S. needs to build and modernize more critical infrastructure but projects are often constrained by local, technical, and regulatory complexity. He cited areas such as data centers, manufacturing, healthcare, power, water, and transportation as relevant domains.
Mehndiratta emphasized that AI is not intended to replace field work, local judgment, or professional sign-offs, but it can reduce manual effort in tasks like research, reporting, permit preparation, inspection documentation, and compliance tracking.
Kareem Zaki, another founding member, said in a statement emailed to TechCrunch that pairing AI with experts and practitioners at these businesses can help compress regulatory bottlenecks, maintain high safety standards, and achieve the work more efficiently, at lower cost and faster.
Why this matters
Thrive’s approach illustrates a model in which AI adoption is advanced not merely by selling software but by acquiring businesses and integrating AI into their operations at scale. The company’s performance metrics and the strategic tie-up with OpenAI help explain investor interest and the ability to raise significant capital. The $2 billion raise is intended to extend that model into additional industries, particularly to address regulatory and operational complexity around physical infrastructure.
