1517 Fund

1517 Fund is a venture capital firm whose Securities and Exchange Commission filings give addresses in Oakland, California (2015 to 2020) and Telluride, Colorado (2022 onward). Its site calls the fund "an anti-establishment educational institution" and its footer describes it as "a venture capital firm backing dropouts, renegade students, and deep tech scientists."¹ The fund was started in 2015 by Danielle Strachman and Michael Gibson, who state that they cofounded the Thiel Fellowship with Peter Thiel in 2010.¹

Founding and the Thiel Fellowship

The home page says Strachman joined "during the founding of the Thiel Fellowship" to lead its design and operations, and that she and Gibson were both on the founding team.¹ A post on the fund's blog, written in 2020, says Strachman "quickly brought structure" to the program after she joined.²

The fund's post of April 18, 2019 states that the fellowship was conceived 24 hours before an interview with Sarah Lacy held on Gibson's first day of work.³ In a 2022 interview, Gibson dated his first day of work to September 27, 2010, and said that Thiel came up with the idea of the fellowship on a flight from New York the night before, planned to announce it the next day at TechCrunch Disrupt, and had hired Gibson as a research analyst at his hedge fund.⁴ The fund's post of August 24, 2020 on the Luminar Technologies listing gives a further account: Thiel and Jim O'Neill brought Gibson into a meeting on his first day and told him they were starting an "anti-Rhodes scholarship" that paid people to drop out of college to work on science and technology.²

Gibson wrote an essay for the fund's blog, dated July 22, 2018, about his own career. In it he describes interviewing with the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2006 after applying for a political analyst role, and says that he had dropped out of the University of Oxford, where he was working toward a doctorate in philosophy, and that MIT's Technology Review had hired him as a writer.⁵ A 2023 review of his book by Astral Codex Ten places the CIA application in 2007, after he left Oxford, and reports that the agency rejected him after an IQ test, a personality test, a statement of values and a set of essay questions.⁶

Thiel Foundation payments to Strachman

The Thiel Foundation's Forms 990-PF list Danielle Lynn Strachman as a paid contractor for "20under20 program management." The return for 2012 lists 275,163 dollars, the return for 2013 lists 250,845 dollars and the return for 2014 lists 174,363 dollars.⁷⁸⁹ The fund's account of its founding says that in 2015 Strachman and Gibson "took our own leap to create a venture fund" to scale work they had done at the foundation.¹⁰

Medici Project grants

The fund's grant program is called the 1517 Medici Project. Its page says that "When Michael and I were at the Thiel Foundation, we put $100K grants behind young people like Vitalik Buterin, Dylan Field, Laura Deming, Austin Russell, and Ritesh Agarwal," and that in the last year there the team piloted "smaller $1K grants to young people."¹⁰ The page describes the first grant as a $1,000 check given to a teen in a Boston cafe in the first weeks of the fund, and says the grants are paid by Venmo, carry no equity or intellectual property terms and are not issued to teams outside North America because of international rules.¹⁰

Funds and Form D filings

The Securities and Exchange Commission Form D notices filed under the name "1517 Fund" begin in August 2015. Fund I, L.P. filed on August 31, 2015, with a first sale on August 14, 2015, a Delaware limited partnership and an offering amount stated as indefinite. It reports 6,400,000 dollars sold to twelve investors, and lists Strachman, Gibson and a general partner entity, 1517 Fund I GP, LLC, as executive officers.¹¹ 1517 Fund I Sidecar LP, filed on December 1, 2015 with a first sale on November 30, 2015, reports 290,000 dollars sold to six investors. Its executive officers include Tec-Rx Ventures LLC and one individual.¹²

Fund II, L.P. filed on April 8, 2019 with a first sale on March 25, 2019 and a stated offering of 40,000,000 dollars, with 14,170,000 dollars sold. An amendment of June 16, 2020 reports 18,950,000 dollars sold to 49 investors. Gibson signed the amendment.¹³

The fund also filed Form D notices for single-company vehicles. SPV A, SPV B, SPV C, SPV D and SPV E were filed between November 23 and December 4, 2020, with first sales dated from December 2016 to September 2019, reporting 3,050,000, 3,012,500, 3,406,000, 3,647,500 and 997,500 dollars sold. SPV F, filed August 16, 2021, reports 6,100,000 dollars sold to 26 investors. SPV I, filed February 11, 2022, reports 3,100,002 dollars sold to 21 investors. SPV S (March 31, 2026) and SPV U (July 9, 2026) report no sales.¹⁴

Fund IV, L.P. reports a first sale on May 12, 2025 and a Form D filed on May 22, 2025 with 25,490,500 dollars sold. Two amendments followed, the first on May 22, 2026 reporting 41,790,500 dollars sold to 43 investors and the second on September 3, 2026 reporting 43,128,900 dollars sold to 85 investors. Fund IV-A, L.P. filed on March 25 and May 22, 2026 and reports no sales.¹⁵

In a July 2022 interview, Gibson said: "Our first fund was $20m. Our second about $25m. Our third fund is $80m."⁴ The December 2016 Bloomberg Businessweek profile reported that about 30 investors had put 20 million dollars into the fund, that the founders had given young technologists "about $5.5 million," and that the firm had made about 30 investments of up to 250,000 dollars each plus 60 or so gifts of as little as 1,000 dollars.¹⁶ The home page lists "$175mm+" in capital committed and "15+ SPVs for Outstanding Investments."¹

Investors and Thiel

A December 1, 2016 Bloomberg Businessweek profile by Lizette Chapman, headlined "Thiel-Backed 1517 Fund Is Stalking the Next Zuckerberg," calls Strachman and Gibson co-heads of the Thiel Fellowship. It reports that "over breakfast" in the spring of 2016 they pitched Peter Thiel on a venture firm that would give gifts, loans and access to a network of fellowship alumni. The article states: "Thiel bit, as did about 30 other investors, including EBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, the Coors family, Texas' Hunt family, and Nicolas Berggruen." It adds that the firm "quietly opened" in April, that about 60 percent of the early fundees were Thiel fellows or alumni, and that the founders named the firm for the year Martin Luther is said to have nailed the 95 Theses to a church door.¹⁶ The Form D for Fund I, L.P. gives August 14, 2015 as the date of first sale.¹¹

The investors named in the article are Pierre Omidyar, Jaan Tallinn, Nicolas Berggruen and, without individual members, the Coors and Hunt families.¹⁶ Raging Capital Ventures introduced its July 2022 interview with Gibson by stating that it was "an investor in 1517."⁴

The Astral Codex Ten review of Gibson's book states that Thiel "invested $4 million" and describes the parting with Thiel as seemingly amicable.⁶

Portfolio

The home page's grid of select portfolio companies includes Atom Computing (neutral atom quantum computing), Xona Space Systems (next generation GPS infrastructure), MakeRain (cloud seeding by drone), Lambda (deep learning cloud and hardware), Loom (asynchronous video software), Fountain (high-volume hiring software), FOSSA (open-source dependency protection) and nTopology (engineering design software).¹ A comparable-transactions table in the fairness-opinion section of the September 2026 prospectus of Calisa Acquisition Corp and Goodvision AI Inc. lists a Lambda financing dated February 19, 2025 with 1517 Fund and Acronym Venture Capital as its investors.¹⁷

Via Satellite describes Xona's Pulsar as a low Earth orbit satellite navigation system. The company's 25 million dollar round of August 2022 was led by First Spark Ventures, with Lockheed Martin Ventures among the new investors and 1517 Fund listed among the existing investors.¹⁸

The fund's post of August 24, 2020 announcing the Luminar listing calls Luminar "one of our companies," says it was going public at a 3.4 billion dollar valuation through a SPAC merger, and describes it as the first company to go public for the fund and the first Thiel Fellow to do so.² The post also reports that Larry Summers called the fellowship "the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy this decade," and that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology banned the fund from recruiting on its campus.²

The fund's post of August 9, 2021 on Upkeep, a software platform for medical spas, says the fund originally supported its founder with one of its smaller angel checks.¹⁹

The home page lists Ethereum, Figma, Longevity Fund, OYO Rooms and Luminar among companies started by Thiel Fellows.¹

Paper Belt on Fire

The home page describes the "paper belt" as "the paper-based industries from Washington DC to Boston" and says that "Michael is dedicated to lighting the paper belt on fire."¹ Gibson's book, Paper Belt on Fire, is listed under his name by Open Library with a first publication year of 2022.²⁰ The review by Astral Codex Ten describes the book as a memoir that begins with the CIA interview and runs through the Thiel Fellowship to the founding of the fund.⁶

UAP and ELDAEON

The UAP sensor company ELDAEON, filed in California in June 2025, names 1517 Fund as its "angel" backer in the company's X profile, with Boost VC named as "pre-seed" backer.²¹