Lux Capital secured $1.5 billion for its largest fund ever

Lux Capital, a 25-year-old venture capital firm known for its investments in advanced science and defense technology, closed its ninth $1.5 billion fund, the largest in the firm’s history.

Although 2025 marks a 10-year low for the number of new venture capital funds raised in venture fundraising in the U.S., according to PitchBook, it’s not hard to see why limited partners continue to pile into Lux.

The company had been investing in defense technologies for years before geopolitical shifts turned the sector into one of the most sought-after investment categories. Lux was a seed-stage investor in Anduril, which was last reviewed $30.5 billionand Applied Intuition, an autonomous vehicle startup that has received and been evaluated for contracts with the Pentagon 15 billion dollars this year.

Lux also made early bets on AI startups before the industry took off, after ChatGPT. The company’s early-stage AI investments include Hugging Face, Runway AI, and MosaicML, which were acquired by Databricks for Databricks. $1.3 billion In 2023.

In addition to being early on in defense technology and AI trends, Lux has made significant exits from its investment in AI drug discovery company Recursion Pharmaceuticals, which went public in 2021, and the sale of Auris Health, a leading surgical robotics company that was sold to Johnson & Johnson for as much as 6 billion dollars In 2019.

The latest fundraising brings Lux’s value under management to $7 billion.