Thrive Holdings raises $2 billion at $12 billion valuation to embed AI in traditional firms

Thrive Holdings closed a $2 billion funding round at a $12 billion valuation, led by SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners and Altimeter Capital. The firm operates as a private-equity-style fund focused on AI: it acquires traditional businesses, mainly accounting firms and IT companies, and embeds daily-process models and automation rather than selling external tools.

Thrive Holdings was created as a spin-out of Thrive Capital, a major investor in OpenAI. In December 2025 OpenAI took an equity stake in the company, and part of the deal included sending OpenAI staff to work directly with portfolio firms to accelerate deployment. The model—“elite teams that embed with the client and build the solution on site”—has become a distinct industry: OpenAI has partnered with private-equity funds to launch The Deployment Company, and Anthropic launched a similar venture called Ode.

Today the platform supports more than 70 companies across two verticals. The accounting arm, with over 50 offices and more than 2,000 professionals, runs TaxAI, an autonomous tax-agent that has processed over 7,000 tax returns with 98 % accuracy and cut preparation time by more than 30 %, according to the company. Shield, the IT arm covering roughly 20 firms, reports a 36-fold acceleration in help-desk resolution times, and the number of custom-built agents deployed has doubled in the past month.

A portion of the new capital will fund a third platform offering regulatory services for the built environment—approval, construction, certification and maintenance of physical assets. “The United States needs to build and upgrade critical infrastructure, but projects get stuck in local, technical and regulatory complexity,” said Anuj Mehndiratta, co-founder of Thrive Holdings, to TechCrunch. The service targets data centers, manufacturing, health care, electricity, water, transportation and other physical infrastructure.

Mehndiratta says AI will not replace field work, local judgment, or professional signatures, but can streamline manual steps such as research, reporting, permit preparation, test documentation and compliance tracking. Kareem Zaki, also a co-founder, added that the goal is “to compress regulatory bottlenecks, keep safety standards high, but do it with less burden on the construction itself—more efficient, cheaper, faster.”