Dallas VC firm Disruptive targets $10 billion megafund off the back of its Groq bet

TLDR

• Disruptive, the Dallas-based venture firm best known for backing chip startup Groq, is raising up to $10 billion for its first conventional megafund, with $7.5 billion already committed.¹²
• The capital is earmarked for roughly 10 late-stage to growth-stage companies over the next two years, with a continued focus on AI, AI infrastructure and defense technology.²
• Disruptive has traditionally invested deal by deal through special purpose vehicles rather than a standing fund, a model founder Alex Davis built around concentrated, infrequent bets rather than board seats or management fees.³
• Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz are the only other firms to have raised more than $10 billion for a new fund so far this year, according to the Wall Street Journal.¹

Disruptive is seeking commitments of up to $10 billion for a new fund, people familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal, with $7.5 billion already locked in.¹ It would be only the second fund the Dallas firm has ever formally raised, after a mid-stage defense-focused vehicle that closed in 2023; otherwise Disruptive has built its portfolio by raising capital deal by deal through special purpose vehicles for individual companies.² A person with direct knowledge of the matter confirmed to the Dallas Morning News that the new fund will target roughly 10 late-stage to growth-stage companies over a two-year window, with a continued focus on AI, AI infrastructure and defense technology.²

Founder and CEO Alex Davis, the grandson of oil and media billionaire Marvin Davis, started Disruptive in 2012 and has run it on an unusually concentrated model: writing large checks into perhaps six companies a year, skipping board seats, and raising each investment's capital individually from a tight circle of sovereign wealth funds, family offices and hedge funds that Davis says he builds around each specific deal.³ That approach produced early stakes in Palantir, Airbnb, Spotify, Databricks, Stripe, Slack and Shield AI, long before Disruptive became widely known for leading Groq's $350 million Series A.³ Groq's profile jumped further last year when the chip startup struck a $20 billion licensing deal with Nvidia for its inference technology, a payoff the Journal credits as the trigger for Disruptive's shift toward raising a standing fund instead of one-off vehicles.¹²

The raise lands amid a broader scramble among venture firms for capital to compete in late-stage AI deals, with Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital both already past the $10 billion mark for new funds this year.¹ Megafunds, defined by PitchBook as vehicles above $500 million, remain rare, and the Journal noted that the SPV structure Disruptive has relied on until now has fallen out of favour across the industry as high-profile startups including Anthropic, Anduril and OpenAI move to restrict the kind of secondary trading SPVs typically enable.¹

Why it matters: one of the AI boom's most selective and historically press-shy investors is abandoning the deal-by-deal model that built its reputation for a conventional megafund, a sign that even the venture firms least interested in scale are being pulled toward it by the sheer size of late-stage AI capital needs.