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 investor in Anduril, which was last valued at $30.5 billion, and in Applied Intuition, a self-driving car startup that secured contracts with the Pentagon and was valued at $15 billion 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 Databricks will acquire for $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, the leading surgical robotics company that was sold to Johnson & Johnson for up to $6 billion in 2019.

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