Palmer Luckey credits early Thiel backing for Oculus sale and later ventures

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Luckey credits Thiel backing

Highlights

Peter Thiel's Founders Fund provided Palmer Luckey with $1 million seed funding for Oculus, which was later acquired by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014.
Thiel and Founders Fund again backed Luckey's Anduril in 2017, which has since reached a $61 billion valuation as a leading defense technology startup.
Luckey cofounded Erebor Bank, now valued at $9.5 billion with Founders Fund support, aiming to offer crypto-collateralized loans for startups in AI, crypto, and defense sectors.

Early funding path and company building

As reported by Fortune, Luckey describes how he was a 19-year-old working a minimum wage job and living in a 19-foot camper trailer when Thiel backed Oculus with $1 million through Founders Fund.

Luckey says he began building the Oculus Rift while being homeschooled and working from his family’s garage. After raising $2.4 million on Kickstarter two years later, he dropped out of California State University, hired employees and rented office space to launch the virtual reality startup.

Although he missed the application window for the Thiel Fellowship, his prototype still drew interest from Thiel. In 2014, Facebook, now Meta, acquired Oculus for $2 billion, a deal that Luckey says underscores the scale of opportunity still available to founders in the U.S.

Defense tech expansion and broader U.S. opportunity debate

Thiel and Founders Fund backed Luckey again in 2017 through Anduril, a defense technology company focused on autonomous weapons systems and surveillance technology for the U.S. military. The company has since grown into one of the world’s most valuable defense startups, with a stated valuation of $61 billion.

Luckey’s more recent venture is Erebor Bank, which he cofounded with Joe Lonsdale and which plans to offer crypto-collateralized loans and other services for startups in AI, crypto, defense and advanced manufacturing. The business has also received backing from Founders Fund and has reached a $9.5 billion valuation, while Luckey’s net worth is reported at more than $5 billion.

His comments come amid wider concerns over economic mobility and employment in the U.S. The text also cites Brookings Institution data saying the U.S. records net negative migration in 2025 for the first time in at least 50 years, even as Luckey argues that self-made founders still show that business opportunity in America remains intact.

Our earlier article on Anthropic’s IPO progress outlined how the AI developer’s June SEC filing and active secondary-market trading signaled rising investor appetite ahead of a potential public debut. We noted that strengthening bid/ask volumes and pricing momentum were helping shape expectations for valuation and demand for large private AI names as they approach the public markets.

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