Dallas's Disruptive closes $10B megafund for AI and defense bets
What's the deal? DisruptiveDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a 15-year-old Dallas investment firm, has closed a $10 billion venture fund to back AI, defense, and software startups. The money roughly doubles the firm's assets under management, and it plans to invest about $1 billion each into roughly 10 late-stage companies.
Who's backing it? Disruptive raised the capital from sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and universities. The firm, founded in 2012 by Alex Davis, grandson of oil billionaire Marvin Davis, runs on a staff of around 30 people.
Why now? The fund marks a structural shift. Disruptive is moving from raising deal-by-deal special purpose vehicles — which often obscured who was investing — to a single pooled fund it deploys at its discretion. "The best companies in the world are basically picking who they want to have invest in them," Davis told Bloomberg.
What's the endgame? Disruptive aims to write large checks into primary raises, with some participation in secondaries. "The market is getting such that to make an impact in some of these companies staying private longer, we can't write small checks," Davis said. Its portfolio includes ElevenLabs, Databricks, and Reflection AI.
The track record: Documents reviewed by Bloomberg show Disruptive returned more than $6 billion on about $1.9 billion invested, with a 94% net internal rate of return after fees as of this summer. Early winners include Groq, whose chip technology Nvidia licensed in a $20 billion deal late last year.
What could go wrong? Concentrating roughly $1 billion in each of just 10 companies amplifies both upside and risk. Competition for top AI and defense deals is intense, and valuations in both sectors are climbing fast.
The signal: Disruptive joins a small cluster of 2026 megafunds, alongside Thrive Capital's $10 billion and Andreessen Horowitz's more than $15 billion. The rush reflects a broader push to finance late-stage AI companies, where rounds have grown large enough to favor investors with exceptional capacity. Defense is heating up too: startups in NATO and allied countries raised $27.1 billion through September, nearly twice the full-year 2025 total.
Read more: Bloomberg, forbes.com
Image credit: Disruptive
