From Perth to Silicon Valley: How Lachy Groom Built a $5B+ Portfolio Beyond the Sam Altman Connection

When a $4.4 million San Francisco mansion was robbed at gunpoint, stealing $11 million in cryptocurrency, the incident thrust its owner into the spotlight—not because of the crime itself, but because of who lived there. Lachy Groom, a then-unknown Australian tech figure, suddenly became tabloid fodder after news outlets linked him to Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO. But reducing Lachy Groom to just a relationship footnote misses the real story: a Perth-born teenager who taught himself to code and went on to become one of Silicon Valley’s most prolific and successful angel investors—backing Figma at $94 million to a $67.6 billion public debut, and now leading a $5.6 billion AI robotics venture.

The Code-Writing Kid: Lachy Groom’s Entrepreneurial Foundation

Before Lachy Groom ever set foot in Silicon Valley, he was already running businesses. Born in Perth, Australia, Groom was introduced to web programming at age 10 when his grandfather taught him HTML and CSS. What started as a hobby quickly became an obsession with building things.

By the time he was a teenager, Groom had launched—and sold—three companies: PSDtoWP (a WordPress template service), PAGGStack.com, and iPadCaseFinder.com. His fourth venture, Cardnap, let users search for discounted gift cards and resell their own. Each project taught him something different about customer acquisition, product-market fit, and business mechanics.

Groom’s father, Geoff Groom, later recalled in interviews that his son had always possessed an entrepreneurial instinct. Before the software ventures, young Lachy had walked dogs for neighbors, set up lemonade stands, and constantly hunted for ways to turn pocket money into real earnings.

But at 17, Lachy Groom made a crucial observation that would reshape his future: Australia’s startup ecosystem couldn’t compete with the venture capital density and valuations of Silicon Valley. More importantly, company multiples in the US dwarfed anything possible in Australia. So he made the decision that would define his career—skip university and move to San Francisco.

Seven Years at Stripe: Building the Playbook for Billion-Dollar Returns

After arriving in the US, Lachy Groom didn’t immediately jump into venture capital. Instead, he joined Stripe, a then-emerging payments company that was rapidly expanding globally. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was the company’s 30th employee—early enough to witness Stripe’s transformation from startup to financial infrastructure giant.

Over seven years (2012-2018), Groom held several roles: starting in growth, then managing global business expansion, and eventually leading Stripe’s card issuing product line. He was instrumental in Stripe’s launches in Singapore, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. In essence, Groom completed a compressed MBA in how B2B SaaS scales from zero to hundreds of billions in processed payments.

This experience handed him three invaluable assets: financial independence, hands-on operational knowledge of how enterprise products achieve massive scale, and membership in what became known as the “Stripe Mafia”—the network of former Stripe employees who later became venture capitalists and company leaders, essentially populating much of Silicon Valley’s investor and founder landscape.

The Art of the Big Bet: Why Lachy Groom’s Investment Strategy Works

In 2018, Lachy Groom transitioned to full-time investing. Unlike most angel investors who deploy capital across dozens of companies with small checks ($5,000 each) and hope a few home runs emerge, Groom adopted a radically different approach: selective, high-conviction bets.

His methodology is often described as “sniper-style” investing. When Groom identifies a company he believes in, he writes large checks—sometimes $100,000 to $500,000—and makes decisions quickly. According to investment database PitchBook, Groom has deployed capital across 204 deals, maintaining a portfolio of 122 active companies, with a reputation for exceptional hit rates and leading rounds in B2B SaaS and developer tools.

His investment thesis is elegant: back software tools that users and developers will naturally gravitate toward—not products they’re forced to use. He emphasizes companies solving real workflow problems with bottom-up adoption models rather than top-down enterprise sales.

The track record speaks louder than philosophy. In 2018, Groom invested in Figma’s seed round when the design collaboration tool was valued at $94 million. By July 2025, Figma went public, its stock soaring to a $67.6 billion market cap on day one. Based on early investment valuations, Groom’s initial bet generated a 185x return. He similarly led early rounds in Notion (backed at $800 million, now generating over $500 million in annualized revenue), participated in Ramp’s seed funding, and invested in Lattice when the talent platform was still searching for product-market fit.

Physical Intelligence: The $5.6 Billion Robot Brain Revolution

By 2024, Lachy Groom’s attention shifted from software tools to a more ambitious frontier: hardware and artificial intelligence convergence. If AI was reshaping software, where would the next internet-scale innovation emerge? His answer: making robots intelligent.

In March 2024, Groom co-founded Physical Intelligence (Pi) alongside an elite technical team. His co-founders included Karol Hausman (former senior researcher at Google DeepMind and Stanford part-time professor), Chelsea Finn (former Google Brain, now Stanford assistant professor), Adnan Esmail (ex-Tesla architect, SVP at defense contractor Anduril Industries), and Brian Ichter (former Google DeepMind and Brain researcher).

Physical Intelligence’s mission is straightforward yet audacious: develop a foundational AI model that functions as a universal “brain” for robots. Rather than programming individual machines to perform specific tasks, the vision is to create software that enables robots to adapt intelligently to complex, real-world environments—essentially bringing general AI into the physical domain.

Capital markets validated the vision immediately. Physical Intelligence completed a $70 million seed round within its founding month, led by Thrive Capital with participation from Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, OpenAI, and Sequoia Capital. Seven months later, in November 2024, a second round brought in $400 million, with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos co-leading alongside returning investors. Most recently, by late 2025, the company raised another $600 million, with Alphabet’s CapitalG leading and existing backers including Lux Capital, Thrive Capital, and Bezos again participating. The company’s current valuation stands at $5.6 billion.

A Journey Beyond the Tabloids

The robbery incident—while sensational—obscured what Lachy Groom’s actual résumé reveals: a 31-year-old who built his success through deliberate strategy and calculated risk-taking, not celebrity association. From a teenager writing code in Perth to Stripe’s 30th employee, from a solo angel capitalist spotting $100 billion exits years in advance to a co-founder steering a multibillion-dollar robotics venture—Groom’s trajectory demonstrates that excellence in tech isn’t about proximity to famous people, but about executing on a clear vision.

The real narrative isn’t “Sam Altman’s ex-boyfriend.” It’s the story of how one Australian taught himself to build products, mastered operational scaling at a payments giant, developed an investment methodology that identified unicorns before they were fashionable, and ultimately moved from betting on software to building the intelligence layer for physical machines. That’s the Lachy Groom story worth examining.