Drive Capital

Drive Capital was built to see opportunities the traditional venture ecosystem often overlooks. Multi-stage global investors from seed to exit.

[Drive Capital @drivecapital]

Today we're announcing the successful raise of an additional $1b to invest in founders and teams in overlooked places.

[The Peel @ThePeelPod]

.@ChrisOlsenCMH on his biggest LP pulling out right as the trucks arrived to move from SF to Ohio:

"This was 2013. It became clear I couldn't build @DriveCapital from San Francisco. But I wasn't going to move until it was real.

We were about to have our first close of $175 million. It had cleared committees, it was in legal.

So we called the movers. They show up, the boxes are packed. The guy says, all right, we're going to Columbus.

And right then my phone rings.

Our single largest commit in that fund, a $50 million check, had changed their mind. They were out. Which meant we no longer had a first close.

My daughter, one year old, was on the floor throwing a tantrum. And we got a picture of her right in front of the moving boxes. I love that picture. Because that's exactly how I felt inside.

But I thought to myself, how do I convince a founder to work with me if I don't use this moment to persevere?

So we packed the truck and went anyways."

[The Peel @ThePeelPod]

Own 40% and a $1B exit returns a $400M fund.

The case for concentration from @ChrisOlsenCMH at @drivecapital:

"The great founders get the same valuations they'd get in Silicon Valley. There's no discount for great companies anywhere in the world. But I have an advantage.

Because there are fewer venture firms here, our investments don't get syndicated very often. A founder might part with 25 or 30% to VCs. But instead of 10% to Sequoia, 10% to Andreessen, 10% to Lightspeed, we consolidate it and say, we'll just buy 30%.

It actually makes the companies more successful, because they manage one board member and one VC instead of three. In some cases we've owned as much as 40% of a business by participating in multiple rounds.

If you own 40% and they sell for a billion on a $400 million fund, you just returned the fund on a "mere" billion-dollar outcome.

That strategy is not sexy. No one will write that headline. Because it's not remarkable.

What generates returns, and what generates liquidity, is different from what drives headlines."

[Drive Capital @drivecapital]

Drive @ChrisOlsenCMH stopped by @ThePeelPod!
At Drive, we've consistently seen what others haven't because we've taken a first principles approach to investing and have always been on the hunt founders who are building exceptional businesses.

Some excellent nuggets here for founders, investors and everybody in between.

Hope you enjoy and thanks to @TurnerNovak for having Chris on!

[Turner Novak 🍌🧢 @TurnerNovak]

New @ThePeelPod with Chris at @DriveCapital

Chris left Sequoia in 2012 to start Drive in Columbus, Ohio on a single bet: the best companies in America are getting built outside Silicon Valley. And almost nobody's funding them.

Timestamps:
0:00 America is the best emerging market on Earth
8:13 Why this couldn't have happened pre-2006
10:48 Top lessons from 10 years at Sequoia
14:17 Why the "meeting factory" model fails
21:42 Searching for vacuums
24:51 Sequoia passed on a company 10 miles too far
29:37 Greece's GDP equals Detroit's
34:34 The biggest tech companies aren't in SF
40:28 223 meetings to raise Fund 1
44:27 Turning one fund into a product catalog
48:47 The day his biggest LP pulled out
52:08 Fundraising is a persistence game
57:36 Returning $500M in a single week
59:56 Only 12 companies hit $50B in 20 years
1:01:29 Why Drive owns 30%, not 10%
1:05:03 Returns over logos, the carry math
1:10:00 Mindset of VC's outside SF
1:14:19 Being early is the same as being wrong
1:15:54 How AI unlocks boring, giant markets
1:19:22 Investing in catalysts, not sectors or geo
1:25:35 3,500 firms raised, 100 survived
1:31:33 OpenAI won't eat every other company
1:37:46 Compete with yesterday's version of yourself

[Drive Capital @drivecapital]

Congrats to @AndrewLonsberry and the @PathRobotics team - what a ride it's been and excited for what's ahead!

[Andrew Lonsberry @AndrewLonsberry]

Path has signed a $600M+ agreement with @wearehii (part of the $900M HII HYPR project).

When I started Path eight years ago, I believed AI and robotics could give the world abundant skilled labor, helping people build the things that matter.

Stronger infrastructure. A revitalized industrial base. The ships, factories, and critical systems our country depends on.

Today is a major step toward that vision.

In this agreement we'll deliver not only welding, but also dexterous assembly, enabling raw components to be turning into finished products. Unlocking throughput that was previously impossible, and unthinkable, without physical AI.

Path was never just a welding company. The goal was always physical AI for all manufacturing and excited to take that next step at scale.

Time to keep building.

[Drive Capital @drivecapital]

Thanks to the 200+ founders, investors and tech leaders who joined us last week as we closed out Chicago Tech Week.

If you're building a category defining company here or anywhere in the country, our inbox (and roof) is always open! CC: @landon20s

[Landon @landon20s]

Hosted 200 founders and investors last week for a startup showcase

On our rooftop

[Nick Solaro @nsolaro]

A year ago, we predicted LLMs would commoditize. In this video we check in on that prediction and share where we’re excited to be investing today. https://t.co/dhQYC1xM8l

[Normal Computing 🧠🌡️ @NormalComputing]

Normal Computing has raised $50 million in strategic funding led by @SamsungCatalyst, bringing total funding to more than $85 million.

We build AI for the semiconductor industry and are developing a new class of computing hardware, using our software to design our own hardware IP.

We're partnered with more than half of the top ten semiconductor companies by revenue through Normal EDA, our purpose-built AI platform. In parallel, we completed the tape-out of CN101, the world's first thermodynamic computing chip, targeting up to 1000x gains in energy efficiency for AI workloads.

Investors include @GalvanizeLLC , @CelestaCapital , @drivecapital , Eric Schmidt's First Spark Ventures, Micron Ventures, Brevan Howard Macro Venture Fund, and @ArcternVC.

We're hiring: https://t.co/QYSxbRDxmi

Full announcement: https://t.co/9Cod1P0n4Q

[Molly Bonakdarpour @mollybonak]

GStack has been SO FUN. I consider myself technical adjacent but by no means a proficient coder. I spend all day thinking about/trying to find companies that should exist. For the first time, I’ve just said eff it and started building them myself. Feels magical. What a gift!

[Nick Solaro @nsolaro]

Everyone’s wondering what AI means for career paths of today and into the future. My opinion? It will always pay to know how to think.

[Molly Bonakdarpour @mollybonak]

Getting medical equipment covered by insurance takes 2–4 weeks. Conduit Health gets it done almost instantly. Now they are leveraging that wedge to build long term relationships with the hardest to reach segment of the US population.

We just led their Series A, and this is a great perfect example of how @drivecapital thinks about investing: find a massive, fragmented industry where incumbents are still stuck in the past, and back the team using tech to change it.

More on why we're excited about Conduit in the video.

[Grishin Robotics @GrishinRobotics]

Conduit Health has raised $17M in Series A funding led by Drive Capital, bringing total capital raised to $22M. The New York company is building an AI-driven operating layer for insurance-covered home medical supplies, starting with durable medical equipment for Medicare and Medicaid patients.

What stands out is the wedge. Conduit is not pitching generic healthcare AI. It is using CareOS, an agentic authorization and reimbursement engine trained on more than 50,000 patient cases, to predict coverage, automate payer workflows, and compress a weeks-long chain of prescriptions, documentation, prior authorization, and delivery into one coordinated workflow. That matters because access to covered supplies is often broken by administrative friction, not product scarcity.

The early traction is notable. Since launching in late 2024, Conduit says it has served more than 50,000 patients, expanded its catalog 4x, and built a payer network spanning 100+ health plans and nearly 90 million covered lives. This round is another sign that AI value in healthcare is moving into reimbursement, navigation, and benefits access - the operational layers patients actually feel.

Quick facts👇
● founders: Natan Wise; Rocky Seftel
● total capital raised: $22M
● HQ: New York, New York
● Investors: Drive Capital; XYZ Venture Capital; Twelve Below; Eniac Ventures

[Molly Bonakdarpour @mollybonak]

PSA for AI founders: stop trying to fit your AI story into the SaaS deck framework. It is time to rethink the key metrics from first principles. Find ways to prove you are capturing services spend.

[Molly Bonakdarpour @mollybonak]

On the surface, it looks like the venture market is “back,” but once you peel the onion a bit, it’s really… not.

Last year, a small group of companies raised a massive amount of the capital, leaving everyone else to fight over what remains.

It’s not just concentrated on the company side. A large share of the VC dollars came from only a handful of firms.

If you’re a seed or Series A founder, this is why fundraising feels harder, even when the headlines might imply things are improving. #stateofventure #startups

[Nick Solaro @nsolaro]

Winning early isn’t the same as winning long term. Here are some thoughts on sustainable differentiation in AI.

[Molly Bonakdarpour @mollybonak]

reposting this because it feels like it is way more possible today!!

[Alpaca @AlpacaHQ]

We are grateful to announce that Alpaca has raised a $150M Series D led by @DriveCapital, valuing us at $1.15B! 🙏

This funding will be used to continue supporting our partners by strengthening Alpaca’s global investment infrastructure, expanding and enhancing our existing offerings, securing regulatory licenses in key jurisdictions, and continuing to bridge traditional and decentralized financial systems.

This milestone comes after a busy 2025, where we launched several key products and features, including 24/5 trading, fixed income, Instant Tokenization Network (ITN), Fully Paid Securities Lending (FPSL), and Omnibus Subaccounting (OmniSub) technology. We also expanded our crypto infrastructure, making it MiCA-compliant and available across 49 US states and in the EU, announced our intended acquisition of WealthKernel, and received memberships from Nasdaq Exchange, the Options Clearing Corporation (OCC), and the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC), significantly reducing our reliance on third-party players across various offerings.

This year, in 2026, our focus is on execution discipline and strengthening fundamentals. We are prioritizing infrastructure resilience, regulatory readiness, and operational rigor to ensure progress is real, repeatable, and durable. With that foundation, we’ll continue to ship more and faster as we advance our mission to open financial services to everyone on the planet.

Read what this means to our Co-Founder and CEO, @iyoshyoshi, below.

Thank you to our investors: @DriveCapital, Citadel Securities, Opera Tech Ventures, MUFG Innovation Partners, @FlatCapital (with @klarnaseb as controlling UBO and Chairman), DRW Venture Capital, @Krakenfx, Altered Capital, X&KSK, @Bank Muscat, Endeavor Catalyst, Portage, Horizons Ventures, @SocialLeverage, Unbound, Diagram, @Derayah, and Vlad Yatsenko. We’re excited to do more in 2026.

We’re excited to do even more for you in 2026.

[Drive Capital @drivecapital]

The mindset we look for in founders? Extreme ownership.

🎙️Podcast clipped from The Dart Board with host @itsdanieldart — featuring Drive Capital founder @ChrisOlsenCMH

Full conversation: https://t.co/0j8AJVX4sf

[Coinflow @CoinflowLabs]

Our CTO & Co-Founder Ben Meeder chatted with @landon20s at @drivecapital & @intercom's AI Builders Day! ⚡️

Huge energy. Smart builders. Big ideas.

Excited for the future we're building right here in #Chicago. 🚀

[Molly Bonakdarpour @mollybonak]

Early in my venture career @drivecapital, I wanted to make an investment in a company no one else wanted to make. My partners weren’t convinced, but I saw something: founder insight + a path to a bigger market.

As an investor, you’re hired to build conviction and then trust yourself. That’s what I did and, fortunately, it paid off.