Founders Fund is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm founded in 2005 by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek, best known for the credo "we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" and a contrarian appetite for hard science and frontier technology over incremental consumer apps. The firm backs category-defining, often monopoly-scale companies across aerospace and defense, artificial intelligence, biotech, fintech and crypto, energy, semiconductors, robotics, and deep tech, investing from seed through late-stage growth with an increasingly concentrated, high-conviction style (its recent growth funds put hundreds of millions of dollars into a small number of companies). Founders Fund manages roughly $17 billion in assets as of 2025 and is headquartered at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco's Presidio. Its portfolio includes many of the defining technology companies of the era, among them SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Stripe, Airbnb, Facebook, Neuralink, OpenAI, DeepMind, Ramp, Nubank, Spotify, and Figma.
Firms are ranked by cumulative portfolio strength — how many highly-rated API companies they've backed, weighted by tier across composite quality and agent-readiness. The averages below are a secondary read on the typical company in the book.
Founders Fund has 63 portfolio companies tracked on the APIs.io network, of which 35 (56%) publish APIs indexed here. The remaining 28 are tracked as profiles without a published API on the network.
Its highest-rated API providers on the network are Twilio, OpenAI, Stripe, Asana, Scale AI.
Portfolio on the Network
Portfolio companies that publish APIs indexed on APIs.io, grouped by their
API Evangelist rating. Exemplar and Strong are expanded by default.
Exemplar5Complete, well-documented, and agent-ready
The 60 portfolio companies with APIs in the catalog, backed by
Founders Fund, scored on the Kin Score. Every figure below is computed from
the catalog — nothing here is written.
A facet is averaged over the members that carry it, not over the whole cohort — the
“Scored” column is that count. Averaging an absent facet as zero would score our own
coverage gaps as the providers’ posture.
What this cohort publishes
Artifact
This cohort
Catalog
Difference
MCP server (any)
27%
15%
+12
MCP server (first-party)
25%
13%
+12
Agent Skills
0%
0%
0
OAuth scopes
32%
12%
+20
Security
100%
98%
+2
Arazzo workflows
12%
2%
+10
Governance rules
30%
18%
+12
mcp_pct counts any mcp/ artifact including ones API Evangelist derived from the provider OpenAPI; mcp_first_party_pct counts only servers the provider publishes. Prefer the latter.
All 63 members of this roster resolve to a provider in the
catalog; 60 carry a score (95%).
The figures above describe the scored members only. Coverage caveat. 47 of 60 scored members had under half their catalog-attributable points satisfied at all (catalog_earned / catalog_max < 0.5). They are INCLUDED in the mean above. A large share here means the cohort mean is partly a measurement of how far our enrichment reached, not only of how these providers publish.Generated from the catalog build of
2 November 2026, across 37080
providers, using the same computation served by the
APIs.io cohort API. Briefs are published for rosters of
5 or more scored providers; below that a distribution is not meaningful.
aid: founders-fund
name: Founders Fund
description: >-
Founders Fund is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm founded in 2005 by
Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek, best known for the credo "we wanted
flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" and a contrarian appetite for hard
science and frontier technology over incremental consumer apps. The firm backs
category-defining, often monopoly-scale companies across aerospace and defense,
artificial intelligence, biotech, fintech and crypto, energy, semiconductors,
robotics, and deep tech, investing from seed through late-stage growth with an
increasingly concentrated, high-conviction style (its recent growth funds put
hundreds of millions of dollars into a small number of companies). Founders
Fund manages roughly $17 billion in assets as of 2025 and is headquartered at
the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco's Presidio. Its portfolio
includes many of the defining technology companies of the era, among them
SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, Stripe, Airbnb, Facebook, Neuralink, OpenAI,
DeepMind, Ramp, Nubank, Spotify, and Figma.
x-type: venture-capital
x-category: Venture Capital
deliveryModel:
model: unknown
open_source: false
commercial: false
callable_host: false
label: Delivery model not determined — needs a product licence on record
confidence: low
source:
- none
generated: '2026-08-28'
method: derived
accessModel:
pricing: unknown
onboarding: unknown
trial: false
try_now: false
public: false
label: Unknown
confidence: low
source: []
generated: '2026-07-22'
method: derived
image: https://foundersfund.com/wp-content/themes/foundersfund/assets/images/logo.svg
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-17'
specificationVersion: '0.23'
tags:
- Venture Capital
- Seed
- Series A
- Growth
- Deep Tech
- Aerospace and Defense
- Artificial Intelligence
- Fintech
- San Francisco
- United States
apis: []
common:
- type: Website
url: https://foundersfund.com
- type: Portfolio
url: https://foundersfund.com/portfolio/
- type: Portfolio
url: portfolio/founders-fund-portfolio.yml
- type: Team
url: https://foundersfund.com/our_team
- type: Team
url: team/founders-fund-team.yml
- type: InvestmentThesis
url: https://foundersfund.com/2018/01/manifesto
- type: Blog
url: https://foundersfund.com/anatomy-of-next/
- type: Crunchbase
url: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/founders-fund
- type: Features
data:
- 'Stage: Seed, Series A, Growth (seed through late-stage)'
- 'Sectors: aerospace and defense, artificial intelligence, biotech, fintech and crypto, energy, semiconductors, robotics, deep tech, consumer'
- 'Geography: primarily United States, with global investments (Europe, Latin America)'
- 'AUM: ~$17B (2025, reported)'
- 'Founded: 2005'
- 'Founders: Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, Luke Nosek'
- 'HQ: Letterman Digital Arts Center, San Francisco, CA'
sources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founders_Fund
- https://foundersfund.com
updated: '2026-07-17'
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
email: kin@apievangelist.com
url: https://apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
url: https://apisjson.org
- FN: Founders Fund
url: https://foundersfund.com
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