Mithril Capital

Before he was a senator, before he was vice president, J.D. Vance was a venture capitalist — and his main stop in the industry was Mithril Capital, the growth-stage firm Peter Thiel co-founded with Ajay Royan in 2012. Vance joined Mithril as a principal in 2016, worked there through the release of his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, and left in early 2017 after clashing with Royan (The New York Times). That short chapter ties the firm to a striking what-if: the future vice president’s career in finance passed through a fund most of the public has never heard of.

Mithril was Thiel’s second act in venture capital, and it was deliberately built for the long haul. When the firm launched in June 2012 with a $402 million fund, Thiel was the largest individual investor, Royan was managing general partner, and the stated mission was to back fast-growing companies that “prefer to remain private as they mature” — in other words, to occupy the territory between early-stage startup bets and late-stage public-market money (AllThingsD). Royan had been managing director at Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital, and a third founding partner, Jim O’Neill, had also come from Clarium’s orbit (AllThingsD).

The name, like Palantir before it, came from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: mithril is the fictional metal “said to be stronger than steel but much lighter in weight,” rare and untarnishing (ZDNet). Thiel himself described the thesis in almost Tolkien-adjacent terms — “Technology holds solutions to most of the world’s most pressing challenges, from resource scarcity to disease” — and Royan framed the ambition as finding the next ARM, FANUC, or SAS Institute: durable, technology-led companies in industries long overdue for change (ZDNet). Typical checks would run around $20 million, up to $100 million, and the firm pointedly excluded social media and cloud computing from its hunting grounds (AllThingsD).

The “mysterious” firm and its Berkshire ambitions

By 2014, Mithril had acquired a reputation in San Francisco for being “mostly a mystery, even to those in San Francisco, where it’s based,” as StrictlyVC put it after sitting down with Royan. The firm had roughly a dozen people — principals to vice presidents, many veterans of Thiel’s past companies — working out of well-appointed offices in the Presidio, assembling a highly concentrated portfolio of companies “that most in Silicon Valley have never heard of, let alone would ever fund,” from underwater robots in Toulouse to a Boston travel-tech company (StrictlyVC).

Royan’s governing analogy was not another venture fund at all: he said the firm was trying to build “a kind of modern-day Berkshire Hathaway.” His argument, delivered with characteristic literary confidence, was that Warren Buffett’s refusal to invest in technology was a product of an earlier era when tech was “boom and bust” — whereas “if you ran the Warren Buffett gambit in 2014 de novo, you’d probably only be doing technology-driven investing, because that’s where you build [today’s] lasting franchises” (StrictlyVC).

The original idea had been even bolder: permanent capital, something like a corporation that would go public fifteen years later, with Royan and Thiel locking up their own money for the full period. Royan admitted that investors found the proposal too radical — “Whoa” — so the firm settled for a conventional fund structure stretched in an unconventional direction: a nearly six-year investment period and almost twelve years of committed capital, so that, as he put it, the firm could “have a view inside this balance sheet” from 2012 all the way to 2024 (StrictlyVC). For the debut fund, Mithril bypassed institutional investors entirely in favor of larger family endowments and sovereign wealth funds, who agreed to lock up their money for the full twelve years; Royan and Thiel personally contributed up to a fifth of the fund’s capital (StrictlyVC).

The firm’s selectivity was extreme even by venture standards. Royan told StrictlyVC that Mithril had funded less than 1 percent of the companies it had examined over the previous twenty months, that the investment committee was just “Peter and myself” so decisions could move quickly, and that checks ran from $20 million to over $100 million — including one exposure of about $100 million, roughly 20 percent of the fund, in a single unannounced company (StrictlyVC).

The $850 million second act

In January 2017, Bloomberg reported that Mithril had raised about $850 million for its second fund, Mithril II LP. The raise carried Royan’s long-horizon philosophy into the fee structure itself: the firm asked investors to pay management fees over twelve years rather than the industry-standard ten, framing it as “a longer than average investment time horizon” (Financial Advisor Magazine (Bloomberg News)). Royan said the firm’s niche was finding technology companies that had built a product but not yet reached a large base of customers — the middle ground where, he argued, other VCs hesitated to deploy cash (Financial Advisor Magazine (Bloomberg News)).

The second fund’s disclosed investments included Palantir Technologies, the data-analytics company Thiel co-founded, and C2FO, a Kansas City finance business (Financial Advisor Magazine (Bloomberg News)). Bloomberg put the first fund’s size at $538 million “from 2013,” and said that after the firm’s cut, Mithril would have $740 million of the new fund to actually invest (Financial Advisor Magazine (Bloomberg News)). The raise happened as Thiel’s public profile was surging — he had backed Donald Trump in the 2016 campaign and was serving on the president-elect’s transition team — though Royan insisted the politics had not affected the fundraising (Financial Advisor Magazine (Bloomberg News)).

The Vance years

The most famous person ever to work at Mithril, other than its founders, arrived in April 2016. J.D. Vance’s path to the firm began in 2011, when Thiel delivered a speech at Yale Law School — Vance was a student there — deriding the professional prospects of law students and arguing their time might be better spent in Silicon Valley. Vance later called it “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School,” and after graduating in 2013 he moved to the Bay Area, worked at the biotech firm Circuit Therapeutics, and kept in touch with Thiel, who wrote a promotional blurb for the 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy (The New York Times).

Thiel personally encouraged Mithril to hire Vance, according to a person familiar with the situation, and Vance joined the firm in 2016 as a principal. Colleagues mostly remembered him for something other than deal-making: introducing them to the ultra-sweet Big Red soda, “a far cry from the La Croix seltzers that define Silicon Valley culture,” as one fellow investor put it (The New York Times). The tenure did not last long. Several months after Hillbilly Elegy made Vance a national figure, he left Mithril “after butting heads with the firm’s managing partner, Ajay Royan,” three people familiar with the situation told the Times. Royan’s public statement was gracious: “J.D. is a friend, and he was a talented, valued member of the Mithril team” (The New York Times).

In 2017, Vance became a partner at Revolution, the venture firm founded by AOL co-founder Steve Case, splitting his time between Ohio and Washington for about eighteen months. Then, in 2020, he founded his own venture firm, Narya Capital, in Cincinnati, turning to his tech connections — Eric Schmidt, Marc Andreessen, and Thiel — to raise a $120 million fund, with Thiel agreeing to serve on Narya’s leadership advisory committee (The New York Times). Bloomberg, reporting the $850 million raise in January 2017, noted that Vance had been among the Mithril partners who rose to prominence in 2016 and was already planning to leave venture capital to return to Ohio (Financial Advisor Magazine (Bloomberg News)).

Mithril’s public footprint ends, more or less, with that second fund. The firm was conceived as a patient-capital alternative to the churn of venture fashion — longer horizons, concentrated bets, no interest in social or cloud — and it briefly served as the launchpad for one of the most improbable political careers of the decade (AllThingsD). Its public footprint ends, more or less, with that second fund (Financial Advisor Magazine (Bloomberg News)); what it did after 2017 is the part nobody has fully written up.

What this profile does not claim

• The debut fund’s final size. It was reported as $402 million at launch (2012), about $540 million (2014), and $538 million (2017). The profile reports the figures as reported rather than picking one.
• The firm’s post-2017 activity or current assets under management. No source read in full supports claims about funds raised, investments made, or assets held after the 2017 second fund.
• Directory figures. Investor-directory sites list figures such as $1.4 billion in assets; the profile does not use directories.
• The exact timing of Vance’s departure. Sources place it in early 2017; the precise month is unverified.
• Unsubstantiated investigations. An AI-generated page suggested an FBI investigation of the firm; the profile does not repeat it.