- Khosla Ventures is reportedly seeking up to $5.5 billion for new investment vehicles, the largest fundraising effort in its 20-year history.
- The firm plans to channel $3 billion into seed and early-stage startups, underscoring its conviction in the next generation of AI companies.
- Founded by Vinod Khosla, the venture firm was OpenAI’s first outside investor and has backed AI startups including Cognition, Sakana AI, and Physical Intelligence.
Khosla Ventures is in discussions to raise as much as $5.5 billion across its newest set of funds, according to a Bloomberg report, which would make it the largest fundraising event in the firm’s twenty-year history, though the people familiar with the matter cautioned the numbers could still shift as talks continue.
The venture fund is looking at $1 billion for seed-stage startups and $2 billion for early-stage ventures, with a separate $2.5 billion opportunity fund earmarked for more mature companies, per Bloomberg.
That means $3 billion, more than half the total, is aimed squarely at the earliest, riskiest stage of company-building, exactly where Vinod Khosla‘s firm made its name by writing an early cheque into OpenAI years before ChatGPT existed.
The new target is a sharp step up. Tech Funding News has tracked Khosla Ventures’ fundraising trajectory closely: the firm was reportedly targeting $3.5 billion across three funds in early 2025, before closing around $4 billion in its most recent vintage. A move to $5.5 billion, if it holds, represents close to a 40% increase on that last raise, arriving roughly 17 months later.
The deal flow behind the number
The case for a bigger seed and early-stage fund shows up in Khosla Ventures’ recent cheque-writing, not just its pitch to LPs.
In July 2026, the firm led a $120 million round for legal AI startup Norm Ai at a $1.2 billion valuation. In June, it backed General Intuition’s $320 million Series A, a startup training AI on gameplay data to teach machines to act in the physical world, just three months after leading its seed round, and joined Sequoia and others in defence startup Mach Industries’ Series C. In April, it led Factory’s $150 million Series C for AI coding agents.
Samir Kaul, a managing director at the firm, put the underlying thesis plainly in TFN’s Norm Ai coverage: AI won’t be trusted in regulated industries until the institutions overseeing it trust it first, a bet that runs through Khosla’s legal AI, defence and robotics deals alike.
The AI fundraising race is getting bigger
Khosla Ventures isn’t raising in isolation. Founders Fund closed a $6 billion vehicle aimed at concentrated, late-stage AI and deep-tech bets, while Sequoia Capital raised roughly $7 billion for an expansion fund to double down on OpenAI and Anthropic, its first major raise since Alfred Lin and Pat Grady took over as co-leaders from Roelof Botha last November.
Menlo Ventures took a different path in scale: after its early Anthropic bet turned a $750 million stake into $14 billion, it closed a comparatively modest $3 billion fund. Kleiner Perkins, meanwhile, closed $3.5 billion across two AI-focused funds in March 2026, nearly double the $2 billion it raised less than two years earlier.
Set against Andreessen Horowitz, which raised more than $15 billion across six funds in early 2026, Khosla Ventures’ $5.5 billion target looks less like an outlier and more like the going rate for a top-tier firm trying to stay competitive in AI right now.
Khosla Ventures’ emphasis on seed and early-stage capital, rather than following the late-stage money into already-anointed foundation model companies, is the more distinctive read: the firm that got into OpenAI before anyone else believed in it is still trying to find the next one, rather than simply buying more of the ones everyone has already priced in.
