Kris Fredrickson, a former investor at Coatue, has joined forces with Victor Lazarte to establish a new artificial intelligence fund valued at $800 million. This collaboration comes less than a year after both individuals departed from Benchmark to pursue their own smaller, founder-led investment activities.
Lazarte left Benchmark in July 2025, where he had invested in notable companies like Mercor, Heygen, and Applied Compute during his two-year tenure as a partner. Shortly after his exit, he successfully raised $200 million for his own venture fund, VL. Now, Lazarte is in the process of securing significantly more capital for a new initiative focused on early and growth-stage startups. He is presenting this larger fund, tentatively named Diffusion, to potential limited partners with plans to co-manage alongside Fredrickson. This new fund's target capital of around $800 million is poised to be one of the largest inaugural venture raises this year.
Fredrickson began his investment journey at Benchmark before transitioning to Coatue. There, he made strategic investments in companies such as Instacart, Chime, and Scale AI. According to a report by Forbes last July, he successfully garnered $175 million for his fund, Verified, which aims to support growth-stage AI startups, including the legal platform Harvey and search engine Perplexity.
The partnership between Lazarte and Fredrickson is particularly intriguing within the venture capital landscape, posing an interesting dynamic for investors who previously supported each of them independently, but not as a collaborative duo. Notably, Fredrickson and Lazarte did not overlap during their time at Benchmark. Additionally, the identities of the backers for venture capital funds are seldom disclosed, leaving uncertainty regarding any potential overlap in their investor bases.
Should they secure the $800 million they are targeting, it would mark the largest fundraise of the year for a new venture and comes at a time when several large funds have accumulated significant capital. For example, in January, Andreessen Horowitz announced it had raised an impressive $15 billion, while Thrive Capital, led by Josh Kushner, announced a $10 billion fund, its largest to date, in February. Sequoia Capital also raised a $7 billion fund in April. Pitchbook’s data indicates that 80% of the $60 billion in venture capital raised globally in the first quarter of this year went to these major funds and only two others.
Nevertheless, the proven ability of Lazarte and Fredrickson to identify and invest in promising growth-stage AI companies is likely to attract interest. Lazarte, who was a Brazilian gaming entrepreneur before venturing into venture capital, played a significant role in a $30 million investment round for the AI training company Mercor in 2024, which had a valuation of $250 million at the time. A little over a year later, Mercor completed a $350 million funding round, surging to a $10 billion valuation. Meanwhile, Fredrickson made his first investment in Harvey in December 2023, and since then, the company has completed several funding rounds, reaching a valuation of $11 billion by March 2026.
