Palmer Luckey's Erebor nears $1.5B raise at $8B valuation

A digital bank that opened its doors roughly five months ago is reportedly closing in on a raise that would nearly double its valuation in well under a year. The Financial Times reports that Erebor, the crypto- and AI-friendly national bank co-founded by Anduril's Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale, is in talks to raise approximately $1.5 billion at a valuation of at least $8 billion. That is roughly twice the $4.35 billion level Erebor secured in a $350 million funding round in December, and it lands on top of deposits that reportedly climbed from $1.1 billion at the end of March 2026 to about $4.05 billion by mid-2026.

The pitch, as Bloomberg described it, is Silicon Valley Bank shaped: a full-service nationally chartered bank built explicitly for clients that traditional banks treat as too weird to underwrite. Erebor's stated focus is technology, payments, investment and defense firms, including virtual-currency market participants, and its product set covers loans backed by cryptocurrency, financing for AI computing hardware, and 24/7 payment settlement using blockchain technology. Peter Thiel's Founders Fund is among the backers.

This lands in the middle of a busy run of AI infrastructure and funding stories on our tracker. Intel just raised $15 billion in common stock citing AI compute demand, and a bank whose loan book grows alongside GPU balance sheets is a different kind of bet on the same trend.

A few things the reporting does not settle. None of the coverage I read named the lead investor in the current round, spelled out how concentrated the $4.05 billion deposit base is among a handful of large clients, or broke out how much of the loan book sits against crypto collateral versus AI hardware. Given how fast the deposit base moved, that mix matters more than the top-line valuation number.

For AI, defense and crypto founders who found the post-SVB banking market uncomfortably narrow, a well-capitalized bank whose entire thesis is underwriting them is straightforwardly useful. Whether it is also a safer counterparty than the one it replaced is a question the next twelve months of loan performance, not this week's valuation, will answer.