Reach Capital announced Tuesday the close of a $265 million Fund V. The thesis of the 11-year-old, San Francisco firm is to back founders building AI applications that can “expand human potential,” Tony Wan, head of platform at Reach Capital, told TechCrunch. In practice, he added, that means looking at founders building across three areas: learning, health, and work.

“We believe AI should serve human flourishing, not replace it,” Wan said. The firm’s previous investments include Replit, ClassDojo, and Coral Care. 

The new fund will write checks of $1 million to $10 million, spanning pre-seed through Series A, into roughly 50 companies over the next three years. So far, no companies have been backed through Fund V.

Limited partners include Capricorn Investment Group, the Los Angeles Fire and Police Pensions, the LEGO Foundation, and College Board. Speaking to TechCrunch, general partner Jomayra Herrera said fundraising went smoothly and that the team was able to raise the new fund in less than six months. 

“The vast majority of our LPs doubled down, and we brought on a few new marquee LPs,” Herrera said. “We attribute this to LP interest in sector-focused boutique funds that focus on conviction-based investments.” 

Reach Capital’s new fund is noteworthy given the barbell shape the broader fundraising market has taken in recent years, with capital flowing overwhelmingly to giant, brand-name funds on one end and to sharply focused specialists on the other, with generalist firms in the middle struggling to get LPs’ attention.

Analysis by PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association found that established firms captured more than 90% of the roughly $62 billion raised across U.S. VC funds through May of this year, leaving a smaller pool of first-time and mid-sized managers to compete for whatever’s left. Reach’s thesis, with over a decade of edtech and impact-investing, fits the mold of the kind of specialist fund LPs have remained open to funding.

The outfit previously raised $215 million for Fund IV in 2023 and $165 million for Fund III in 2021.

One of its most recent exits came in June, when Superhuman — the productivity platform now owned by Grammarly — acquired GPTZero, the AI-detection startup co-founded by Princeton graduate Edward Tian. Terms weren’t disclosed, but GPTZero had grown to more than 19 million registered users and $30 million in annual recurring revenue on just $13.5 million raised, and Reach was one of several investors in the company, alongside Uncork Capital, Footwork, and Jack Altman’s Alt Capital.

Detroit-based Grounded has had to be flexible since it was founded in 2022.

The startup was initially built around the idea of customizing electric vans like Ford’s E-Transit and General Motors’ BrightDrop for the “van life” set, using a modular, “Lego-like” system. Sensing a bigger opportunity, Grounded then started customizing those vans for small businesses. But then GM discontinued BrightDrop last year, Ford axed plans for a next-generation electric Transit van, and EVs generally became a harder sell in the United States.

That hasn’t stopped Grounded. On Tuesday, the startup announced that it has closed a $5 million seed round, with repeat investments from existing backers Also Capital and Chicago-based early-stage firm The 81 Collection, along with Animal Capital, the Michigan Outdoor Innovation Fund, and “various SpaceX alumni,” according to founder and CEO Sam Shapiro.

Grounded has also opened a new 50,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Detroit where it will take its core modular design business and scale it to be vehicle-agnostic, allowing the startup to customize fit kinds of fleet needs — be they electric or combustion-powered. Production at the facility starts this month, according to the startup, with capacity ramping up next year.

“This new facility is a turning point for Grounded,” Shapiro said in a statement. “We built this company to bring smart, modular electric vehicles to the businesses and institutions that keep our cities running. With this expansion, we can finally build at the scale our fleet customers need and bring our platform to an entirely new class of commercial vehicles.”

Grounded has already snapped up customers in the commercial (like Colgate and Nokia), medical (Wayne State University Medical and the Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition of Hawaii), and even veterinary sectors. In a statement on Tuesday, Grounded’s chief product officer Nadia Meyer said the company is seeing “notable growth” from food and beverage and public safety customers, among others.

For Shapiro, GM’s cancellation of BrightDrop was a catalyzing moment. He wrote in a blog post late last year that Grounded would embrace gas-powered vehicles, allowing the startup to build on far more popular models like Ford’s combustion-powered Transit and Mercedes-Benz’s Sprinter vans. It also allowed Grounded to seek out customers who weren’t ready for electric vehicles due to infrastructure challenges.

Shapiro said at the time that Grounded would exhaust the remaining available BrightDrop inventory while it pivoted to new models, including leveraging electric and hybrid options from fellow startup Harbinger.

“Grounded is not an ‘EV company,’ nor is Grounded a vehicle company at all,” Shapiro wrote. “We build the smart, high-tech, modular workspace or living space on top of the chassis: the design, materials, power system, and Grounded+ software that turn a vehicle into a modern, connected mobile healthcare vehicle, command center, camper van, coffee shop, and more. The application layer on top of the vehicle is our product.”

Anthropic’s revenue continues not just to grow at an historic pace but to accelerate. The model maker’s annualized revenue run rate — a projection of a full year’s revenue based on a recent, shorter period —surpassed $65 billion at the end of July, Bloomberg reported on Monday, up from $47 billion in May and just $9 billion at the end of last year.

Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment.

The company’s investors expect it to continue to grow at approximately the same rate for the remainder of the year, finishing 2026 between $100 billion and $120 billion, the Financial Times reported.

Meanwhile, rival OpenAI has doubled its revenue to $40 billion, from $20 billion at the end of 2025, Bloomberg reported last week.

The two companies may calculate their revenue metrics differently, but Anthropic’s growth rate has captivated investors far more than OpenAI’s has.

Both companies have filed confidential IPO paperwork, Anthropic is expected to hit the public markets ahead of OpenAI —possibly as soon as this fall. Anthropic will be seeking a public valuation of $2 trillion or more, according to the Financial Times, which would make it the largest market debut on record.

Anthropic was last valued at $965 billion in late May, when it raised a $65 billion round.