Author: Zen, PANews

Less than a year after its previous $4.6 billion growth fund was successfully raised, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund has essentially completed the fundraising for its new $6 billion fund, "Growth IV". Reports indicate that approximately $1.5 billion of the new fund came from Founders Fund partners' own funds, and it has attracted significant institutional and investor interest, with external LP subscription demand exceeding the fund's capacity.

Beyond the capital logic of top funds enjoying strong bargaining power, Founders Fund, as the most ideologically driven capital group in Silicon Valley, once again expressed a certain declaration in its fundraising: AI, defense technology, aerospace, and "national capabilities" have once again become the central themes of capital.

What makes Founders Fund unique is that it embeds a very clear vision of technology-associated politics into its investment practices. From SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril to Stripe and OpenAI, Founders Fund creates a combination of national foundational capabilities and platform technologies that can be directly embedded into national capabilities, becoming part of security, intelligence, aerospace, industry, and infrastructure.

"Returning to the Original Aspiration": The Reemergence of the Cold War-Style Technological Nation Model

In recent years, the shift of Silicon Valley's tech elite towards the right has become a new trend. These tech-right groups are typically characterized by a belief that technological progress, capital, and highly capable elites should dictate the direction of society, while simultaneously expressing aversion to progressive cultural politics, aversion to high regulation, and a growing willingness to link technology with state power.

Many describe this phenomenon as Silicon Valley's "invasion" of the Pentagon. But in reality, Silicon Valley and the American state apparatus have never truly been separated; what is happening today is simply the re-emphasis of this relationship.

In the internet age, the public imagines Silicon Valley as a garage myth teeming with tech geniuses, anti-bureaucratic, anti-government, and a world that grew entirely on the free market. But historically, Silicon Valley's origins have always been deeply intertwined with defense, military, and national research systems.

In the 1960s, Fairchild Semiconductor helped the United States become a leader in space exploration and the computer revolution.

During the Cold War, top universities like Stanford University undertook numerous defense-related research projects, and related early electronics startups primarily served the military and government agencies. Therefore, the innovation and growth of early high-tech industries were closely linked to the U.S. national security system. For example, the roots of the modern internet lie in projects from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense in the 1960s.

Furthermore, NASA's Apollo program's specifications and procurement requirements for integrated circuits significantly spurred innovation and technological maturity in semiconductor manufacturing, helping to rapidly reduce prices once manufacturing processes matured. In other words, early chips didn't first prove themselves in the civilian market before naturally entering the national system; rather, national demand first propelled them forward, leading to gradual commercialization.

This is why Peter Thiel and his allies' current strategy is seen as a revival of a certain "Cold War-era technological nation-state model." The difference lies in the fact that during the Cold War, the main players were government laboratories, DARPA, NASA, and traditional contractors, while today the new protagonists are venture capital-backed dual-use technology platforms. The Pentagon hasn't withdrawn; it's simply actively ceding the source of innovation to the commercial technology system.

Peter Thiel embraced this shift earlier and more explicitly than most VCs. Founders Fund didn't just recently jump on the bandwagon of investing in defense technology; it was an institutional investor in Palantir, the "AI arms dealer," long ago (Peter Thiel himself is a co-founder of Palantir). Founders Fund has also long been a core supporter of Anduril, the "AI defense company," and last year, as the lead investor, invested $1 billion to help Anduril complete a $2.5 billion funding round at a valuation of $30.5 billion.

SpaceX, possessing capabilities in commercial spaceflight, military satellites, battlefield communications, and launches, is a prime example of private capital entering critical national infrastructure. It secures massive contracts from NASA and the National Reconnaissance Office, and in the civilian market, through launch services, commercial satellites, and the Starlink broadband network, it has built a global commercial footprint. Starlink, in particular, not only provides communication services to remote areas, maritime transport, and aviation, but also effectively serves as a fundamental communications infrastructure in the Ukrainian conflict.

Internal divisions within the tech right wing

a16z, another significant player in the tech-right camp, wields even greater influence in the capital markets. Its massive $15 billion funding round earlier this year directly captured nearly 18% of all venture capital funding in the United States.

In recent years, a16z has undergone a significant rightward shift, no longer content with simply being a consumer internet fund, and has begun to incorporate "national interest" into its investment language. a16z has also specifically established the "American Momentum" fund, aiming to invest in companies that support national interests, covering areas such as defense, manufacturing, supply chain, education, housing, and public safety.

However, grouping Thiel and Marc Andreessen of a16z into the same camp masks their internal differences; their paths are actually quite different.

a16z's underlying approach is more akin to technological accelerationism than Thiel's elitist nationalism. Andreessen's focus is on over-regulation, suppressed innovation, and the need for American development. Therefore, a16z's ability to simultaneously invest heavily in AI, crypto, enterprise software, biotechnology, and defense technology suggests a bet on "the technological wave itself," rather than a clear bias towards secure nations, geopolitical competition, and high-barrier platforms, as seen with Thiel.

According to a Reuters report last year, a16z even planned to raise a $20 billion AI mega-fund, with the core objective of capitalizing on global investment in US AI companies. Thiel's Founders Fund, on the other hand, seems to concentrate its funds on a few "civilization-level companies," preferring to continuously invest heavily in a very small number of winners.

This is also the most important difference between the two approaches. a 16z believes more in allowing technology to expand freely, while Thiel believes more in enabling a few strategic technology companies to achieve dominance, and behind these are fundamentally different political philosophies. "To create and capture lasting value, companies should pursue monopolies," Thiel's approach always carries a distinct, even blatant, elitist consciousness. Reflected in his investments, he doesn't just want to invest in growth, but prefers companies that can structurally reduce competition, raise barriers to entry, and control key nodes.

This is precisely why the alliance between tech-right, which is closely associated with Trump, and MAGA is inherently fragile. Their convergence is based on their shared aversion to the traditional establishment, their dislike of recent Democratic oversight and cultural politics, and their willingness to use "great power competition," "American industrial resurgence," and "national capacity rebuilding" as common ground.

However, the divide between elites and populism is equally evident and irreconcilable. MAGA's social foundation leans more towards populist protectionism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-globalization. Meanwhile, tech-right, represented by Silicon Valley capital, inevitably relies on highly skilled immigrants, global talent networks, and transnational capital flows. When the Trump administration raised H-1B costs and tightened vetting, it directly impacted American tech companies, precisely because these companies are highly dependent on engineers from India, China, and globally in the AI race.

AI issues have amplified this divide. Tech-right tends to view AI as a core engine of American growth and national competitiveness, and is hostile to regulatory and security constraints. Trump's attempt to use federal funding to constrain state AI regulation aligns with this preference of tech capital. However, the attitudes of the MAGA grassroots towards AI are far less unified; they worry about job displacement and instinctively distrust the cultural stance and power expansion of Silicon Valley giants.

The benefits of technological innovation are becoming increasingly distant from ordinary people.

Recently, in addition to Founders Fund being reported to be completing a $6 billion fund, venture capital firm General Catalyst is also raising approximately $10 billion. These large-scale fundraising activities by top funds reflect a more realistic trend: capital and technology are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few leading platforms . According to the FT, in 2024, more than half of all VC funding in the US went to only nine institutions, and the number of active VCs has fallen by more than a quarter from its 2021 peak.

This has led to two consequences—the centralization of the startup ecosystem itself, and the shift of high-potential technology companies to the public market.

On the one hand, top funds are increasingly able to retain the leading companies in their portfolios, while the capital required for subsequent rounds is growing larger, resulting in fewer and fewer players truly qualified to participate in later-stage financing. On the other hand, large unicorns such as Databricks, Stripe, SpaceX, and OpenAI are seeking ways to remain in the private market long-term; their large-scale private financing is known as "private IPOs." In other words, without the disclosure and public scrutiny of an IPO, these companies can achieve expansions that would otherwise be possible in the secondary market using massive private equity funds.

OpenAI is preparing for the largest IPO in history, with a valuation that could approach $1 trillion.

Therefore, more and more of the steepest early-stage valuation expansions are being absorbed by the private market, and the "public pricing point" at which ordinary investors can participate is becoming increasingly later. Historically, many great tech companies have still achieved most of their market capitalization growth after going public. Looking at a longer timeframe, US venture capital as a whole has not consistently outperformed the Nasdaq.

This means that ordinary investors will likely be able to participate in relatively late-stage and relatively gradual growth in the public market in the future; the most explosive early-stage dividends are increasingly being blocked in the private market.

The problem doesn't end there. Once these companies offer more than just consumer-facing applications; they become national data platforms, government software, or satellite networks, gradually becoming part of the system and infrastructure, the question shifts from whether ordinary investors can share in the growth dividends to whether private capital is preemptively seizing key interfaces for the future operation of the nation and society with relatively limited public accountability.

Palantir's example is particularly telling; its business has seen rapid growth in recent years, largely built on a series of government contracts. While companies certainly have the right to sell software to governments, a more complex issue arises in public governance when the same company's platform becomes deeply integrated into sensitive systems such as the military, intelligence, and immigration enforcement. The public's confusion lies in whether government procurement is merely acquiring tools, or whether it is gradually binding parts of governance capabilities, data structures, and decision-making processes to a private platform.

Therefore, what is truly alarming is not some mysterious narrative of "behind-the-scenes controllers," but rather the simultaneous occurrence of capital concentration, the platformization of state power, and the relative lag in technology regulation. Peter Thiel is not simply betting on the next wave of unicorns; he is more likely betting on the next phase of the American power structure itself , and that this vision will be increasingly realized by technology platforms nurtured by private capital.

This process may not necessarily lead to an out-of-control "technological Leviathan," but it will at least force democratic societies to confront a more unavoidable problem: when infrastructure, state capacity, and capital gains are more tightly bound together, who will have sufficient institutional capacity to constrain them before they actually cross the line?

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