In Brief
Posted:
12:09 PM PST · January 7, 2026
Lux Capital, a 25-year-old VC firm known for its investments in frontier science and defense technology, has closed a $1.5 billion ninth fund, the largest fund in the firm’s history.
Despite 2025 marking a 10-year low for the number of new VC funds raised in the U.S., according to PitchBook, it’s not hard to see why limited partners are still piling into Lux.
The firm has been investing in defense technologies for years before geopolitical shifts turned the sector into one of the most desirable investment categories. Lux was a seed-stage investor in Anduril, which was last valued at $30.5 billion, and Applied Intuition, an autonomous vehicle startup that secured contracts with the Pentagon and was valued at $15 billion last year.
Lux has also made early bets on AI startups before the industry took off, post-ChatGPT. The firm’s early-stage AI investments include Hugging Face, Runway AI, and MosaicML, the latter of which was acquired by Databricks for $1.3 billion in 2023.
In addition to being early to the defense tech and AI trends, Lux has realized significant exits from its investment in AI drug discovery company Recursion Pharmaceuticals, which went public in 2021, and the sale of Auris Health, a surgical robotics pioneer that sold to Johnson & Johnson for up to $6 billion in 2019.
The latest fundraise brings Lux’s assets under management to $7 billion.
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