SpaceX backer 137 Ventures closes $700M to invest in high-impact tech companies -- TFN

137 Ventures, the San Francisco-based growth firm that has backed SpaceX across roughly two dozen rounds since 2010, has closed more than $700 million in two new funds, bringing total assets under management to more than $15 billion.

The raise comes as SpaceX is expected to pursue a public listing this year at a valuation that could exceed $1 trillion, and 137 Ventures, which now owns more than 1% of the company with a stake valued in excess of $10 billion, stands to be one of the largest beneficiaries of that event in venture capital history.

Justin Fishner-Wolfson, who founded the firm in 2010 alongside S. Alexander Jacobson after they met at Founders Fund, has spent 16 years building a model that most growth investors would find uncomfortably concentrated.

Rather than spreading capital across a wide portfolio, 137 writes large cheques into a small number of companies and backs them repeatedly across multiple rounds. The SpaceX position, initiated in 2010 and compounded across 24 subsequent investments, as per Dealroom data, is the most extreme expression of that philosophy, and its current scale makes the fund's AUM almost secondary to the single asset within it.

The rest of the portfolio reflects the same conviction-first approach. Over the past year, the firm deployed more than $1 billion into companies including Cognition AI, Hadrian, Impulse Space and Physical Intelligence, spanning AI agents, precision manufacturing, aerospace propulsion and robotics.

Earlier bets include Anduril, Gusto and Ramp, each of which has become a category leader in its respective market. The pattern is consistent: back companies building infrastructure that is difficult to displace, write enough capital to matter, and hold.

The competitive context for this fund close is the broader shift happening in venture. Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Thrive Capital are all expanding their growth-stage mandates into the same territory. What 137 has that most of VCs do not is a decade and a half of specific relationships -- with SpaceX, with Anduril, with the defence and aerospace community that has moved from the periphery of venture to its centre.

The $700 million will be deployed in line with the firm's existing thesis: larger positions, longer holds, follow-on capital for existing portfolio companies at critical inflexion points.