XYZ partners are Ross Fubini, Chauncey Hamilton, Art Clarke and Camille Ricketts, along with CFO Steve Hilk and associates Jean-Claude Dorsainvil, Lucy Wilmot, Angie Kirk, Christine Hubbard, Mackenzie Bohannon, Alyssa Kelley and Alexa Romanoff.
XYZ Venture Capital
Midas Seed mainstay Ross Fubini and his firm have raised $325 million in two new funds and added partners Camille Ricketts and Art Clarke of Notion and Apple.
When Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz, CEO of Medicare-focused startup Chapter, showed Ross Fubini his year-end numbers for late 2023, the tech investor quickly presented him with an offer: let his firm, XYZ Venture Capital, launch its next round of funding.
The entrepreneur had first met Fubini in 2020 through the alumni network of Palantir, the government and enterprise software provider co-founded by Peter Thiel that now trades at a market cap of about $60 billion. At the time, Fubini was known for writing early checks to founders from that community, like Anduril, the defense technology company that’s expected to be valued at $14 billion. XYZ was a small company, investing from its first fund, and with its second partner, Chauncey Hamilton, it was just getting started.
But after making his way to the capital table right after Chapter’s funding round that year, Fubini quickly proved his worth. Two of Chapter’s three largest institutional partners signed up after his presentations. And when Chapter raised a Series A from Thiel and J.D. Vance’s Narya Capital, it was Fubini who welcomed Blumenfeld-Getz into his home, helping him craft his winning pitch deck.
So when XYZ, now larger, with a growing team and hundreds of millions in assets, offered to invest more, it wasn’t a hard choice. XYZ led Chapter’s $50 million round in May, at a valuation of more than $500 million, according to PitchBook, a startup data specialist. “Ross doesn’t follow the prevailing winds of venture capital or the zeitgeist,” Blumenfeld-Gantz said. “He doesn’t see himself as being above the nitty-gritty.”
The ability to go further with a few select companies – doubling or even tripling – was one of the main reasons Fubini struck out on its own nearly a decade ago; today, with the expansion of XYZ, it’s a vision that’s increasingly becoming a reality.
It was by investing mainly solo in the Palantir network that Fubini, 48, was propelled into the three annual editions of the Forbes Midas Seed List of the world’s top early-stage investors. Now, with XYZ’s fourth seed fund, a $200 million vehicle, and a $125 million second opportunity fund in the bank, XYZ doubles its partnership to four with the hires of Camille Ricketts, a veteran of workplace collaboration software unicorn Notion, and Art Clarke, most recently Apple’s head of AI infrastructure.
Anduril remains the firm’s biggest winner so far—XYZ’s investment is now worth tens of millions of dollars at Anduril’s most recent valuation, enough on paper to make its first fund several times over—though XYZ can’t boast any major exits yet. But with $760 million in assets now under management and its new team, XYZ is now hoping to be known for more than its public sector and ex-Palantir experience, and to act aggressively whenever it finds a competitor.
“We’re very proud of the people we work with and the work we’ve done for them,” Fubini said. “We have all the assets to keep working and find the next big thing. It’s just a matter of working very, very hard.”
Fubini was working as a CTO when he met the man who would define his career. A native of northern Virginia, he had caught the dotcom-era startup bug. He was at Symantec in 2006, when he connected a former employee with another friend who had just joined a new startup launched by CEO Alex Karp, Thiel and others, Palantir. The match was fruitful: One became Palantir’s COO and more recently its CTO; the other its first staff engineer and later the head of its government-facing practice.
In 2010, while co-founding his own startup, CubeTree, and helping sell it to SuccessFactors, Fubini stayed close to his friends at Palantir, comparing notes on go-to-market strategy and helping mentor its growing roster of executives as a part-time consultant. He later worked at Kapor Capital, investing alongside Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, and at Canaan Partners, an established venture capitalist with more than 20 years of experience at the time. But the investments Fubini wanted to make—particularly by partnering with the growing number of executives leaving Palantir to start their own companies—led him to branch out on his own.
“The original idea was that Palantir was going to get rid of some great entrepreneurs because it was made up of very customer-focused techies, mostly in little-known industries like the public sector,” Fubini says. “I was lucky enough to get to know the company, to know that it was very special, and to build around that.”
Named after a mathematical theorem developed by his great-grandfather, Guido Fubini, who taught at Princeton alongside Albert Einstein, XYZ started with just $10 million and quickly backed 22 Palantir founders, across 16 companies. Fubini had worked directly with some of them, like Anduril co-founder and CEO Brian Schimpf; others, like Chapter’s Blumenfeld-Gantz, were connected through referrals within Palantir’s network.
“There aren’t many venture capitalists who are former executives,” Schimpf said. “That’s something Ross does particularly well: He has experience running things, which allows him to provide valuable advice.” Chad Byers, another Midas Seed List and Chapter investor, added: “To me, XYZ is Ross’ personality embodied in a company: curious, relentless, and optimistic about technology.”
Along the way, Fubini took a detour to co-found Village Global, another company, with his billionaire friend Reid Hoffman and others, before deciding to focus fully on XYZ. In 2020, just before the lockdown pushed them to Zoom, Fubini met Hamilton, who had spent more than five years at First Round before co-leading the firm’s long-running student venture program Dorm Room Fund. Together, they raised XYZ’s second $80 million fund, then two more, a third $130 million fund, and a previously unannounced $90 million “Go Faster” opportunity fund in 2021.
Most of XYZ’s partners work out of the Presidio office in San Francisco, with the exception of Hamilton, who resides in the Connecticut suburbs of New York.
XYZ Venture Capital
With Hamilton’s help, XYZ has branched out into other areas of public sector business, such as Promise, a payments platform focused on low-income consumers; it has also supported companies outside of that field, such as Scribe, which documents workflows to capture and share institutional knowledge.
Today, XYZ is considering writing checks between $500,000 and $8 million in early-stage funding, or Series B checks, as big as needed to co-lead the round, from its Opportunity Fund. For its new funds, its partnership has doubled to include Ricketts, who worked with Hamilton in the first round and then led Notion’s marketing efforts before becoming an operating partner at another VC firm; and Clarke, a former Fubini colleague and longtime running mate who spent three years leading product at Palantir when it was first launched, and who until recently played a major role in Apple’s AI and machine learning efforts. (He was also Apple’s only “official privacy champion” for its AI initiative.)
“We’re both realists, but Camille leans more towards the positive side of realism, and I lean more towards the glass half empty side,” Clarke said. “It takes a lot to get me excited, but you can bet I’ll defend it when I get it.”
If Palantir was Fubini’s first meal ticket, he now hopes XYZ will find similar chains of entrepreneurs from Hamilton’s old stomping grounds at the Dorm Room Fund and Ricketts’ work with Notion and as a mentor at startup accelerator Neo, as well as Clarke’s network at Apple and among his peers in technical AI.
Industry-wide funding for U.S. defense technology and government sales startups peaked in 2022 with 76 deals and $2.5 billion deployed, according to an analysis conducted for Forbes per Crunchbase; last year, VCs led 62 deals, deploying $1.4 billion. It’s also an increasingly crowded market, with niche funds and multi-stage companies making these businesses a core strategy.
Several groups have even sprung up to facilitate mutual investment among Palantir alumni, such as Palumni VC. But among institutional investors, XYZ still has a leg up: In late 2023, Fubini and his team backed cybersecurity startup Wraithwatch; the firm has since invested in three other companies in defense technology, government procurement, and social services, all without notice.
As a generalist fund, XYZ will continue to offer its expertise in selling to government agencies as a calling card, but will not pigeonhole itself. The firm has also recently backed companies in the areas of rapid AI model testing and tax preparation, healthcare marketing, and mental health.
“We consistently win the contracts we want,” Fubini said of XYZ’s public sector roots. But, Hamilton added, “we’re always looking for the next big thing.”