Lux Capital lands $1.5 billion for its largest fund ever

Lux Capital, a venture capital firm with a 25-year history specializing in frontier science and defense technology, has closed its largest fund to date, raising $1.5 billion for its ninth fund. This milestone comes despite 2025 being a decade-low year for new VC funds in the US, highlighting strong investor confidence in Lux’s strategic focus. The firm’s early investments in defense technologies, such as Anduril and Applied Intuition—both valued highly and with Pentagon ties—have positioned it well amid growing geopolitical interest in the sector. In addition to defense tech, Lux Capital has been an early backer of AI startups, including Hugging Face, Runway AI, and MosaicML, the latter acquired by Databricks in 2023. The firm has also seen successful exits from AI drug discovery company Recursion Pharmaceuticals, which went public in 2021, and surgical robotics company Auris Health, sold to Johnson & Johnson in 2019. With this latest fundraise,