Two former Benchmark investors are pitching something you don’t usually see this soon: a joint, $800 million AI fund—less than a year after each left to raise smaller, founder-led vehicles on their own.

Victor Lazarte left the Silicon Valley fund in July 2025 after backing companies like Mercor, Heygen and Applied Compute in his two-year stretch as a partner. After exiting Benchmark, he quickly raised $200 million for his own fund, VL.

Now, Lazarte is pitching a much bigger fund to make bets on early and growth stage startups. He’s telling prospective limited partners he plans to raise a new fund called Diffusion and co-manage it with Kris Fredrickson, according to several investors who say they were pitched on the effort. The target is roughly $800 million, one of the larger first-time venture raises of the year.

Fredrickson started his investing career at Benchmark before moving to hedge fund Coatue, where he backed companies like Instacart, Chime and Scale AI. Forbes reported last July that Fredrickson had raised $175 million for his own fund, Verified, to back growth stage AI startups like legal platform Harvey and search engine Perplexity.

Lazarte and Fredrickson did not respond to a request for comment.

The pairing is unusual for venture capital funds, and poses a puzzle for fund backers, who had bet on the pair individually, but not as a partnership. Fredrickson and Lazarte didn’t overlap at Benchmark. The backers of venture capital funds are rarely disclosed and it is unclear whether there’s overlap here.

The $800 million raise would be the largest of the year for a new fund and comes at a time when a handful of mega funds have raised huge sums of money. Andreessen Horowitz announced it had raised $15 billion in January. Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital’s raised a $10 billion fund, its largest ever, in February. And Sequoia Capital raised a $7 billion fund in April. Pitchbook data shows that 80% of the $60 billion in capital raised globally for venture capital in the first quarter of this year went to those funds, and just two others.

Even so, Lazarte and Fredrickson’s track record at picking hot growth-stage AI startups is likely to prove a draw. Lazarte, a Brazilian gaming entrepreneur before he became a VC, led a $30 million round for AI training company Mercor in 2024 at a $250 valuation million. Just over a year later, Mercor raised a $350 million round at a $10 billion valuation. Fredrickson first invested in Harvey in December 2023; the company has since raised multiple rounds, most recently reaching a $11 billion valuation in March 2026.

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