Duquesne joins Fab2's $500 million round as family offices span three sectors

The same mid-September week, family offices put money into a $3.7 billion semiconductor startup, a $1.1 million Chilean wealth fintech, and a $4.5 million Indian cooling company, and the FO Pro deal roundup shows the label 'family-office direct deal' covered three very different seats. Duquesne Family Office, Stanley Druckenmiller's investment vehicle, joined Fab2's $500 million Series A, which closed Sept. 9 at that $3.7 billion valuation, in a round led by Fundomo and including Corner Capital, Paradigm, Maverick Silicon, StepStone Group, Protagonist, UDC Ventures, and angel investor Naval Ravikant; Duquesne was the only family office in the list. The roundup dates two smaller raises on Sept. 8: a $1.1 million round for Betterplan, a Chilean wealth-management fintech expanding into Argentina, and a $4.5 million Pre-Series A for Circolife, an Indian cooling company.

Founded in 2022 by chip designer Jim Keller and Sam Zeloof—who built his first working chip as a teenager in his family's garage, FO Pro reports—Fab2 designs and manufactures every piece of equipment that goes into its fabs and then mass-produces the fabs themselves, an approach the founders call a 'fab fab' that points to selling complete production lines rather than the tools inside them. The valuation has risen nearly 37-fold since a $100 million seed round in 2023.

The roundup gives no revenue figure, so a 37-fold valuation in three years is a price built on expectation; it places Fab2 alongside Substrate and xLight among the startups FO Pro describes as racing to break up a semiconductor equipment market long dominated by ASML and TSMC.

The coverage describes Duquesne only as joining a round led by Fundomo and otherwise made up of venture firms and an angel, so the shape of the position matters as much as the sector. That is the follower's version of direct investing: a stake in a large private company at a price negotiated by someone else.

Betterplan has been raising money since its 2020 founding, and the Sept. 8 round brought total funding to roughly $4 million, with the Anastassiou family office leading, a second family office the coverage does not name joining, and existing backer Fondo Vulcano participating; the capital is earmarked for Argentina.

The business underneath is small but compounding: Betterplan manages about $150 million across some 2,000 clients, an average of roughly $75,000 each, and has doubled assets under management in each of the past two years, with co-founder Joaquín Rhodius, a decade-long LarrainVial veteran, joining to help lead the Argentina push. Against a $4 million funding history, a $1.1 million lead check is large enough to shape what happens next.

Circolife, an Indian cooling-as-a-service company, secured $4.5 million in a Pre-Series A anchored by Bharat Jaisinghani, joint managing director of Polycab India, with family office Vyom Wealth—the vehicle of Ramesh Jaisinghani—participating alongside Nazara Technologies founder Nitish Mittersain and family office S N Damani. The company rents air-conditioning units to businesses across five Indian cities, with sensors feeding a predictive-maintenance system it plans to extend into digital twins of client properties, and FO Pro reports the capital is meant to take it from roughly 10,000 active subscriptions.

The executive, not his company, is the one committing capital on the roundup's account, and two family offices are filling in around him rather than around a fund, which makes the anchor matter. That is a more strategic-looking structure than a venture-led round, and a harder one to read from the outside.

Betterplan's product is financial, while Circolife places physical cooling equipment in client buildings and charges for it, a model that consumes capital with each new subscription; a family office writing both checks is underwriting two different cash-flow shapes, and the Betterplan round, where Anastassiou led, is the one where a $1.1 million commitment bought the lead.

Set the three side by side, and the phrase 'family office direct deal' stops describing a single behavior. Duquesne took a follower's share of a $3.7 billion chip company, Anastassiou led a $1.1 million fintech raise, and Vyom Wealth and S N Damani filled out a $4.5 million services round anchored by an executive—three positions in the same week, each with a different amount of say over terms.

Of the five family-office participants the roundup mentions, four sit in the two raises under $5 million; only Duquesne appears in the $500 million one. One reading is that family offices fit the smaller end of the market, where a single check can carry a round. Another is that disclosure drives the count—Betterplan's second family office is not named, and Circolife's backers are described as including the names given. The next few weeks of deals will test which.