‘Fame gets me in the right rooms’: Jake Paul just raised a new nine-figure fund with ambitions to be the ‘best ‘celeb’ investor of my generation’

Jake Paul, the 29-year-old YouTuber, Disney Channel actor, and one-time wannabe singer (1) who was satisfyingly knocked-out during a boxing match on Netflix (2) just a half year ago, is now donning yet another hat as a backer of late-stage startups. Anti Fund, the venture capital firm Paul co-founded with the entrepreneur Geoffrey Woo back in 2021, told DealBook on Thursday (3) that it has closed its first dedicated growth fund at $100 million, lifting the firm’s total assets under management to $180 million.

That’s a long way from where Anti Fund started as an AngelList rolling fund (4) — essentially a subscription service that lets investors commit money on a month-to-month basis. The new growth vehicle is the firm’s biggest single pool yet, and it lands roughly six months after Anti Fund closed its oversubscribed $30 million Fund I (5) and named Paul’s brother, Logan, a general partner.

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“My goal is to be regarded as the best ‘celeb’ investor of my generation,” he told DealBook by text.

Jake Paul’s wild career

Paul, born in 1997 in Cleveland, started posting on Vine when he was 16 years old (6), in 2013. His online antics and comedic skits helped him rack up more than five million followers and two billion views before the beloved six-second-video app shut down. He moved to YouTube, then to acting, playing a teenage prankster on the Disney Channel sitcom “Bizaardvark” until the network cut ties midway through the second season in 2017 amid complaints from his Los Angeles neighbors (7).

Paul continued his career as an influencer, launching the Team 10 collective, then pivoted to boxing. He turned pro in 2020 and co-founded the promotion company Most Valuable Promotions in 2021. The peak, at least commercially, came in November 2024, when his bout with Mike Tyson streamed to a record 65 million concurrent viewers on Netflix (8) — the most-streamed sporting event ever at the time. So, love him or hate him, you have to acknowledge Paul is a wildly successful creator. Last year, Forbes ranked him third on its list of top creators (9), with earnings of roughly $50 million.

Inside Anti Fund’s backers and bets

Anti Fund pairs Paul’s reach with Geoffrey Woo’s technical background (10) — Woo studied computer science at Stanford and sold an earlier startup to Groupon.

The firm runs what it calls an “extreme barbell strategy (11)”: small first checks of $100,000 to $500,000 in exchange for 10% of early-stage technical founders, and growth checks of $10 million or more into companies that have already broken out. Its portfolio reads like a who’s-who of the AI and defense boom, including OpenAI, the drone maker Anduril, the corporate-card company Ramp, the AI coding firm Cognition, and SpaceX, which Anti Fund backed before it went public last week.

The new growth fund’s investors include Aquarian Holdings, a $27.1 billion investment firm; FocusPoint Private Capital Group; Daniel Michalow, a former partner at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw; and Matt Holt, who founded the private equity firm Thoreau Group. They join existing limited partners that, per the firm’s earlier disclosures, include prominent venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon.

“Fame gets me in the right rooms and the right time, and my business knowledge allows me to strike the right deals and partnerships,” Paul told DealBook. “The future will be defined by robotics in defense and manufacturing, semiconductors, power and specialized A.I. labs.”