Thrive Capital is a venture capital firm in a hurry.
Thrive, which has invested in popular start-ups like Instagram and Warby Parker, plans to announce on Monday that it has raised a new $400 million fund, its third since its founding four years ago. Money for the new fund came from existing investors like Princeton University and the Wellcome Trust, as well as new mostly not-for-profit institutional investors.
Its latest fund-raising effort comes as it builds on a so-far successful track record of investing in some of the most-discussed start-ups around. Several of those investments have already garnered promising exits: Instagram was sold to Facebook for nearly $1 billion, while the video game spectator site Twitch sold itself to Amazon.com for $1.1 billion.
As more of Thrive’s bets have succeeded, so too have its fund-raising aims. It raised $40 million in 2011 for its first fund that included outside capital, and the next year raised a $150 million fund..
Along the way, Thrive has eschewed an easy-to-describe investment focus. Its portfolio of companies has included consumer Internet retailers like Warby Parker and the shaving start-up Harry’s; OpenGov, a provider of financial data software for local governments; and Oscar, a health insurer.
Thrive has also made clear that it will invest in both early and late-stage companies as long as it believes they are bringing some sort of innovation to the table.
“Our ambition as a firm is to invest in or build what we believe will be the most transformative businesses of the next decades,” Joshua Kushner, a co-founder of Thrive, said by telephone.
The main focus for the firm, he added, was finding companies that either create businesses or fundamentally reshape existing ones. In the former camp are companies like Instagram or Twitter, which tend to be more consumer-facing Internet start-ups. The latter group tends to tackle older industries like health care or education through new approaches like a more-technology-minded bent, as Oscar has done.
Money has continued to pour into start-ups — investments in the first six months of the year totaled $37.8 billion, the best beginning of the year showing since 2001, according to Ernst & Young — prompting some concerns of a growing bubble. But Mr. Kushner argued that real businesses were still being started, creating opportunities for investors to make significant returns as well.
“I’m of the belief that now is the greatest time to be an entrepreneur,” Mr. Kushner said. “It’s the best time to start a business since the industrial revolution.”