The New York investor Thrive Holdings is receiving fresh capital to transform accounting and IT companies with artificial intelligence. As the company announced on August 12, 2026, two billion dollars from SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital will flow into the next growth phase. The valuation thus rises to twelve billion dollars.
Investors value the company transformation at twelve billion dollars
Thrive Holdings is a spin-off of OpenAI investor Thrive Capital and has been acquiring majority stakes in service companies since its founding in April 2025 to transform them with AI tools. Original owners retained a significant stake in the acquired businesses. With the current round, the total capital raised since the founding amounts to three billion dollars. In addition to the three mentioned investors, other unnamed institutional investors are also participating. So far, the company has consolidated two platforms: Current in the accounting sector with more than fifty affiliated firms and around two thousand professionals, and Shield for IT services with about twenty companies. The fresh capital is primarily intended to finance the expansion of these two platforms.
The investor list includes well-known names from the AI funding scene. According to its own statements, SoftBank has invested more than 64 billion dollars in OpenAI, while Altimeter Capital and D1 Capital Partners are also involved with Anthropic. For them, betting on Thrive Holdings is also a bet that AI investments in traditional service industries will pay off faster than in further model training rounds.
OpenAI assigns research personnel for the AI agents
Since December 2025, OpenAI has held a stake in Thrive Holdings and has sent its own research and product teams to work alongside the operational teams. The most visible result is Tax AI, a system based on OpenAI’s Codex that assists accounting teams in filling out tax returns. The software has now processed more than 7,000 tax returns at over thirty affiliated firms, with an accuracy of around 97 percent and a throughput more than 50 percent higher. The processing time per return has been reduced by about one third. These figures come exclusively from OpenAI and Thrive Holdings themselves and are independently unverified.
The principle behind it: When a professional corrects an error in the software, the correction becomes a structured test case that Codex improves upon independently. Corrections made by professionals are thus immediately incorporated into new training signals, rather than being processed in separate development cycles. On the OpenAI side, Boris Power, head of applied research, coordinates the collaboration in an additional dual role at Thrive Holdings, according to company statements. This shows how closely the two companies are now intertwined.
New division targets building authorities and approval processes
With the fresh capital, Thrive Holdings is launching a third platform. It aims to automate technical and regulatory processes related to approval, construction, certification, and operation of physical infrastructure – for example, at building authorities, inspection organizations, and licensing offices. The company justifies the move by wanting to facilitate the modernization of physical infrastructure in the USA.
Industry observers place the model within a broader trend. Just on July 1, 2026, the Milanese software roll-up Bending Spoons went public on Nasdaq – following a similar strategy of company acquisitions and subsequent AI transformation. The market valuation there climbed to 25.7 billion dollars on the first trading day. Also, other AI providers are currently seeing a lot of capital flowing into a few, very large rounds. At the end of July, Amazon completed its 50 billion dollar investment in OpenAI, while Anthropic is simultaneously holding investor meetings ahead of a possible IPO. Thrive Holdings is positioning itself as a counter-model to pure model developers: The value is not to arise from new AI models themselves, but from their application in sluggish but lucrative existing industries.
It remains open whether the model can be scaled beyond the USA. Approval processes for construction projects differ significantly from state to state and from country to country in Europe. This is likely to make automation based on the US model significantly more complex than in the accounting or IT sector. It will also be crucial whether the efficiency gains cited by OpenAI and Thrive Holdings can be maintained as the number of cases grows. So far, they rely on a comparatively small sample of just over 7,000 processed tax returns.
