100 firms, 894 deals and moves

The high-volume seed investor and accelerator that Dave McClure and Christine Tsai built on a "lots of little bets" thesis, which spread a Silicon Valley playbook into Southeast Asia, MENA, Latin America, Korea and Turkey, survived its founder's 2017 harassment scandal, and is now best understood as a global seed-and-ecosystem platform rather than a classic concentrated venture partnership.

Joe Lonsdale's Austin-based firm — the successor to Formation 8 — that turns the Palantir alumni network into a deal-flow and company-building machine, investing across logistics, health care, fintech, bio and, most visibly, defence and the "American industrial base", with flagship funds that grew from ~$300m (2016) to ~$880m (2023).

The Palo Alto firm that built its name on "prepared mind" thematic research, made the defining Series A of the social era (Facebook), and became one of the few US venture brands with genuinely local, top-tier franchises in Europe and India.

Brad Gerstner's crossover firm, started with a few million dollars in 2008, that invests in both public technology stocks and late-stage private companies. It is known for early growth bets such as Snowflake, a $40bn SPAC merger with Grab that went badly, a public "Time to Get Fit" letter that pushed Meta into its 2023 "year of efficiency", and a large, early bet on Nvidia and AI.

The Boston company Georges Doriot ran from 1946 to 1972: the first institutional venture-capital firm, which turned MIT science into companies, proved the power law with Digital Equipment, and showed through its own decline why venture capital later moved into the limited-partnership model.

The Menlo Park firm founded by two operator-entrepreneurs that rebuilt venture capital around a talent-agency-style platform, media and brand, then scaled into a multi-strategy, ~$90bn+ registered investment adviser spanning seed to growth, crypto, bio, American Dynamism and AI infrastructure.

The University of Chicago spin-out that evolved from a tiny tech-transfer fund into biotech's most aggressive company-creation machine — known for founding companies around academic science and capitalising them with $100m-to-$1bn+ "mega-launches" that few rivals can match.

The investor who financed the "traitorous eight" into Fairchild, co-founded Davis & Rock (1961–68), one of the first West Coast venture limited partnerships, and then, investing largely on his own account, backed and chaired Intel and sat on Apple's board: the archetype of the founder-first venture capitalist.

A Dutch-born, transatlantic multi-stage venture firm that shrank and reinvented itself after the dot-com bust as Cambridge, Massachusetts' archetypal "seed-led" biotech company creator — small funds, in-house incubation, and a habit of selling companies early to pharma at attractive multiples.

The London firm founded by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström to prove that Europe could build global technology companies, which grew from a founder's personal vehicle into one of Europe's largest Series A-to-growth investors and the ecosystem's best-known publisher of data on European tech.

The London firm that began in 2000 as Benchmark Capital's European arm, went independent in 2007, and became one of Europe's most consistent early-stage investors — from MySQL, Bebo and Talend to Revolut, Depop and Dream Games — while keeping a deliberately European, Series A-centred model.

The Boston-born, technology-only firm that runs early-stage venture, growth equity and control buyouts from a single fund family. It is a technology-only, stage-agnostic specialist in B2B software, known for sector theses (cloud, OpenCloud, industrial tech), for steady fund growth, and for treating buyouts of mature software businesses as part of the same practice as venture.

The small, equal-partnership Silicon Valley firm that refused to scale for thirty years — five or six general partners, no associates, one ~$400–500m fund at a time, 30% carry — and used that discipline to back eBay, Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Snap and Cerebras, before raising a $2bn package, including its first growth fund, in 2026.

The oldest continuously operating venture investor in the United States, born out of the Phipps family's Carnegie Steel fortune, which went from a quiet family-office venture arm to one of the largest multi-stage firms in the world on the strength of its cloud-software "roadmaps", and which made a public virtue of its mistakes with the industry's best-known Anti-Portfolio.

The Mumbai-born seed and Series A firm that started in 2010 with a ~₹100 crore domestic fund when India had almost no institutional seed capital. It grew into one of the country's most consistent early-stage franchises (TaxiForSure, Unacademy, Slice, Spinny, Purplle, GreyOrange), and its unusually open writing on fund economics and the "Indus Valley" market made it a public voice on what Indian ve

The Bill Gates-led climate-technology fund, backed by a club of billionaires. It has 20-year fund lives and scientists on its investment committee, and it was designed to fund the hard-science "missing middle" of decarbonisation (fusion, green steel, long-duration storage, geothermal, low-carbon fertiliser) that conventional venture capital avoided after the cleantech bust.

Alphabet's independent growth-equity fund, launched in 2013 as Google Capital, which writes large minority cheques into late-stage private technology companies — Stripe, CrowdStrike, Airbnb, Lyft, UiPath, Duolingo — and sells Google's operating know-how rather than strategic partnership, with Alphabet as its only LP.

Philippe Laffont's technology "Tiger cub" hedge fund that built a parallel private-investment business, from a single $50m Snapchat cheque in 2013 to multi-billion-dollar growth funds, applying data-heavy public-market analysis to private companies, overreaching in 2021, and then reorienting around AI infrastructure and wealth-channel products.

The Stockholm early-stage firm that was among Spotify's first institutional investors and then built one of Europe's most consistent seed and Series A records — iZettle, Small Giant Games, Kry, Depop, Pleo, Trade Republic and Lovable — while staying deliberately focused on early rounds.

One of the oldest US venture partnerships still operating. It was founded in Boston in 1970 to commercialise MIT-area technology, moved its centre of gravity to Silicon Valley in the 2000s, and is known for disciplined early-stage leads (Zendesk, Airtable, Vercel, DoorDash at seed) and for twice handing money back to LPs rather than deploying it at the top of a market.

The Bay Area "deep tech" specialist founded by Matt Ocko and Zachary Bogue on the thesis that computation, data and engineering could transform trillion-dollar physical industries such as space, biology, energy, agriculture, transport and defence. Its record mixes durable winners with a heavy share of SPAC-era disappointments.

The third-generation Draper family venture firm that coined "viral marketing" with Hotmail, built the industry's first global franchise network of affiliated funds, backed Baidu, Skype, Tesla, SpaceX and Box — and then broke apart in 2017–19 after Steve Jurvetson's departure, splitting into Threshold Ventures (early stage), DFJ Growth (late stage), Jurvetson's Future Ventures and Tim Draper's Drap

Yuri Milner's late-stage growth investor that invented the modern "pre-IPO mega-round" with its 2009 Facebook deal: large checks into category leaders at what looked like rich valuations, no board seats, founder-friendly voting terms and heavy use of employee secondaries. The model was later copied by Tiger Global, SoftBank and the crossover funds, and its reputation is still shadowed by its Russi

Germany's longest-running independent early-stage VC. Founded in 1997 at the height of the first internet wave, it survived the dot-com bust and became a multi-strategy European platform (Digital West, Digital East, Health, Growth). Its Digital East fund made one of the best seed bets in European history: it led UiPath's $1.6m seed in 2015. By 2026 it managed ~€2.5bn, held by its active partners u

The Indonesia-focused seed investor, started in 2009 with ~$2.2m of mostly Japanese money by an Indonesian engineer and the co-founder of Japan's mixi, which wrote early checks into Tokopedia, Traveloka and Mercari, and then grew into Southeast Asia's best-known multi-stage "ecosystem" VC, with a growth arm co-owned with corporate partners.

The Palo Alto firm, spun out of Formation 8 in 2015 by former Flex executive Lior Susan, that bet early and almost exclusively on "physical industries" (semiconductors, robotics, manufacturing, logistics, energy and autonomy). It pairs venture funds with an in-house company-building practice and growth funds sized for capital-heavy hardware, and its early position in Cerebras became one of the def

The India venture franchise that began in 2001 as the India arm of SAIF Partners (originally the SoftBank Asia Infrastructure Fund), was built by Ravi Adusumalli into one of India's most consistently profitable early-stage investors (MakeMyTrip, Justdial, Paytm, Swiggy, Urban Company, Meesho), rebranded as Elevation Capital in October 2020, and in 2025–26 added a $400m late-stage vehicle and a $50

The San Francisco Bay Area firm that bet earlier than almost anyone that the cloud would replace enterprise software, and turned that single thesis (Salesforce, Veeva, Zoom, Doximity) into a concentrated, low-volume B2B franchise that lead-invests in five to seven companies a year and in 2025 raised its first $1bn fund.

The Menlo Park firm that Aydin Senkut, Google's first product manager, grew from a ~$4m personal angel pot into a ~$900m-per-fund seed and Series A lead investor, known for founder-friendly commitments ("never vote against a founder") and an unusually high hit rate in global breakouts such as Shopify, Adyen, Canva, Credit Karma, Notion and Plaid.

The Philadelphia-born, San Francisco-headquartered firm that turned "institutional seed" into a category — writing the first institutional cheque into Uber, Square, Roblox, Warby Parker, Looker and Notion — and built the industry's model of a founder-community "platform" around a deliberately small fund.

Noubar Afeyan's Cambridge, Massachusetts "bioplatform innovation" company, which conceives scientific companies internally from speculative hypotheses, founds and controls them through early rounds, and holds them in a long-lived ecosystem. Moderna made it the most consequential venture-creation firm in biotechnology, and a long list of ambitious platform companies that failed to deliver makes it

The Palo Alto "micro-VC" founded by Mike Maples Jr. and Ann Miura-Ko that helped invent the modern seed fund — staying deliberately small, taking board-level positions in a handful of companies a year, and building its brand around a theory of "inflections", "insights" and "thunder lizards" that backed Lyft, Twitch, Okta and Applied Intuition early.

Kirsten Green's San Francisco firm, the defining early-stage investor of the direct-to-consumer (DTC) era. It used a former retail analyst's eye for brands and consumer behaviour to back Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, Glossier and Jet.com, then broadened into consumer health, fintech, marketplaces and consumer AI as the DTC thesis wore out.

The San Francisco firm built by the "PayPal Mafia" around Peter Thiel's contrarian, power-law worldview — a small partnership that writes very large, concentrated cheques into hard-technology monopolies (SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril) and promises never to fire a founder.

A Cambridge, Massachusetts firm founded by two entrepreneurs that grew from a regional early-stage fund into a global, multi-strategy "investment and transformation" company, combining seed-to-growth venture capital with company creation, non-equity financing, a health-system acquisition and public-market deals, under the "responsible innovation" banner of CEO Hemant Taneja.

The Menlo Park–Shanghai–Singapore firm, founded in 2000 as Granite Global Ventures, that made "cross-border" venture its brand — early in Alibaba, GrabTaxi, Musical.ly and Xiaohongshu on one side of the Pacific and Zendesk, Square, HashiCorp and Opendoor on the other — and then, under US congressional scrutiny of its China AI holdings, split in March 2024 into Notable Capital (US) and Granite Asia

One of the oldest continuously operating US venture partnerships — a Boston firm founded in 1965 by an alumnus of Georges Doriot's ARD that reinvented itself as a Silicon Valley enterprise-software and consumer-network franchise, best known for the Facebook Series B, LinkedIn, Workday, Palo Alto Networks and Airbnb, and for running as an equal partnership with no founder-owner.

Alphabet's wholly owned venture arm, founded in 2009 to invest Google's balance-sheet cash for financial return rather than strategic fit, which grew from a $100m-a-year experiment into a >$10bn manager that invests across software, consumer and, unusually for a corporate fund, life sciences, with a single LP and no fundraising cycle.

The China franchise that Neil Shen built under the Sequoia brand from 2005 into the country's largest and most successful venture and growth investor (Meituan, Pinduoduo, ByteDance, Vipshop, Shein), which became independent as HongShan in 2023–24 and has since used its scale to move into control buyouts of global consumer brands while US–China tension shrank its traditional US-dollar LP base.

The quiet San Francisco fund-of-funds that has, since 1983, been one of the most consistent institutional limited partners in top-tier venture capital — packaging access to Kleiner Perkins-era Sand Hill Road, then to European, Asian and growth-buyout managers, for pensions, endowments and foundations that could not get in on their own.

Munich- and Berlin-based multi-stage venture firm, formerly Holtzbrinck Ventures. It started in 2000 as the venture arm of the Holtzbrinck publishing group, became partner-run and renamed itself HV Capital in 2020. It backed Zalando, Delivery Hero, FlixBus, Scalable Capital and sennder early and is one of Germany's largest venture managers, with ~€2.8bn raised by 2023 (reported) and a €710m Fund I

The growth-equity arm of ICONIQ Capital, the San Francisco multi-family office built around the fortunes of Silicon Valley's founders (Mark Zuckerberg was its best-known early client). It turned privileged access to a network of tech billionaires into a concentrated, low-profile growth fund for enterprise software, and by 2025 it was leading rounds as large as Anthropic's $13bn Series F.

The first foreign venture investor to set up shop in China (1992–93), sponsored by Pat McGovern's International Data Group and built by Hugo Shong and Quan Zhou into a multi-strategy China investor (venture, growth, buyout, RMB funds) whose early bets on Sohu, Tencent, Ctrip, Baidu and Xiaomi made it a founding institution of Chinese venture capital, and which bought its own former parent in 2017.

The not-for-profit strategic investor created by the CIA in 1999 to bring commercial start-up technology into the US intelligence community. It writes small equity cheques alongside private VCs, pairs them with paid technology-development work programmes, and is judged mainly on whether its government partners adopt the technology, not on financial returns. Its early bets on Keyhole (Google Earth)

The Geneva-born, London- and San Francisco-based firm that proved a European venture partnership could compete for the best deals on both sides of the Atlantic, through a run from Skype and King to Adyen, Datadog, Figma, Revolut and Wiz.

The San Francisco firm that turned buying unwanted venture stakes after the dot-com crash into a full "liquidity platform" for the venture industry, combining secondaries, emerging-manager fund commitments, direct Series B investments and small tech buyouts, until Goldman Sachs bought it in 2025 for up to ~$965m.

The seed fund started by Y Combinator insiders Garry Tan, Alexis Ohanian and Harj Taggar, whose ~$7m first fund caught Coinbase and Instacart and turned the YC network into one of the best-performing seed records of the 2010s — before its founding partners departed (Ohanian 2020, Tan 2022) and the firm, now led by Brett Gibson, had to prove it was more than its founders.

The Menlo Park firm that began as one of Silicon Valley's original early-stage partnerships (Seagate, LSI Logic, Netflix, TiVo), handed its early-stage franchise to Redpoint in 1999, and reinvented itself as the leading focused "later-stage venture" firm, writing concentrated growth checks into category winners such as Twitter, Snap, Dropbox, Coinbase, HashiCorp and Perplexity.

The corporate venture arm of Intel Corporation and, by number of deals and years of continuous activity, one of the largest corporate venture capital (CVC) programmes ever built. It invests Intel's balance-sheet money in start-ups that expand demand for Intel's chips or fill gaps in its roadmap, and its history shows the strengths of that model (Red Hat, VMware, Habana Labs, Astera Labs) and its w

Japan's oldest and largest independent venture capital firm, founded in 1973 under the Nomura Securities group, which has backed roughly a thousand companies to IPO, built the template for Japanese "IPO-pipeline" venture investing, ran overseas arms that backed FireEye, Palo Alto Networks, Bill.com and Tudou, and since 2020 has refocused on concentrated, lead-investor positions in Japanese start-u

The Jerusalem-based firm founded by Erel Margalit under Israel's Yozma programme that pairs venture investing with regional-development "startup cities", made Israel's defining telecom-bubble exit (Chromatis) and its defining cybersecurity outcome (CyberArk), and is known for concentrated, high-ownership positions held for many years.

The Latin American venture firm founded in 2011 by two MercadoLibre co-founders, which turned operator credibility and an early bet on Nubank into the region's largest and best-performing venture franchise, now running paired early-stage and "Opportunity" funds of roughly $1bn per cycle.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla's Menlo Park firm. It is built on contrarian "science experiment" bets, with a willingness to lose 1x to make 100x. That approach produced an expensive cleantech washout in its first decade, then outsized wins in fintech, food tech, space and, above all, OpenAI.

The Sand Hill Road original that turned company-building engineering judgment into the most storied record in venture (Tandem, Genentech, Sun, Netscape, Amazon, Google), lost its way in the cleantech and growth-fund era of the 2000s–2010s, and was rebuilt after 2018 as a smaller, product-focused early-stage and "Select" growth firm.

The Menlo Park enterprise-infrastructure shop born out of a Wall Street firm's venture arm that bet its first fund at the top of the 2000 bubble, survived it, and then rebuilt itself into a multi-stage, multi-region platform — best known for the $485k Snapchat seed check, a long run of infrastructure wins (AppDynamics, Nutanix, MuleSoft, Rubrik, Netskope) and, in the 2020s, lead positions in front

The London seed firm of father and son Robin and Saul Klein, who turned two decades of family angel investing (The Accelerator Group, from 1998–99) into an institutional seed franchise in 2015, added the Latitude growth fund in 2019, and in 2022 reorganised as Phoenix Court Group — a "seed to IPO and beyond" platform behind Wise, Zoopla, Improbable, Tide, Cleo, Zego, Motorway and (via Latitude) Mo

Chris and Crystal Sacca's climate-only venture firm: a loud, profane, founder-friendly early-stage investor that turned the Lowercase Capital fortune and brand into ~$2bn of climate funds, and made carbon removal, fusion and "buy-curious" commercial decarbonisation its signature themes.

The New York firm that began as a nanotech specialist in 2000 and became one of the leading "science and national security" venture investors, known for Josh Wolfe's contrarian theses, company creation, and early positions in Anduril, Hugging Face and Auris Health.

Microsoft's corporate venture arm, launched in 2016 as Microsoft Ventures and renamed M12 in 2018, which invests Microsoft balance-sheet capital in Series A–C enterprise software, AI and infrastructure start-ups. It sits beside a much larger body of direct strategic investments made by Microsoft itself, above all the ~$13bn OpenAI partnership, which turned Microsoft into the most consequential cor

One of Silicon Valley's oldest continuously operating venture firms, founded in 1969 by Tommy Davis (formerly Arthur Rock's partner) with Stanford as an early partner. It backed the 1980s networking, workstation and biotech wave, then reinvented itself under Navin Chaddha as a "people-first" inception-to-Series-A firm with a focused AI strategy.

One of Sand Hill Road's oldest continuously operating venture firms (founded 1976). It is a steady, partnership-run multi-stage investor whose fifty-year record runs from Gilead and 3PAR through Roku, Siri and Uber. Its ~$1bn bet on Anthropic from 2023 turned it into one of the defining AI investors of the decade.

The Menlo Park early-stage firm founded in 1983 by former Intel marketing chief Bill Davidow and Larry Mohr, which built its reputation on semiconductor and enterprise-technology company-building (Rambus, FormFactor), rode the dot-com cycle, made large thematic bets on personalized medicine and clean energy in the 2000s, and stopped raising flagship funds after its ninth fund (2007), with successo

São Paulo's longest-running independent venture firm, founded in 2005 by Eric Acher and Fabio Igel, which backed Brazil's first unicorn exit (99), helped create the local early-stage market, and grew from a small founder-funded vehicle to paired early-stage and portfolio "Expansion" funds of ~$700m in 2021 before shrinking its fund size in the post-2022 downturn.

The bicoastal, multi-stage "aircraft carrier" of venture capital: founded in 1977–78 by an East Coast banker, a West Coast venture investor and a T. Rowe Price fund manager, NEA built one of the largest and most consistent firms in the industry by investing across technology and healthcare, from seed to pre-IPO, out of very large flagship funds.

The India–US early-stage firm, founded in 2006, that runs a single fund and one integrated team across Menlo Park, Mumbai and Bengaluru, backing Indian consumer and logistics companies (Snapdeal, Delhivery, Rapido, Zepto) alongside developer-infrastructure software sold globally (Postman, MinIO, Druva, Observe.AI), and that has kept to ~$700m funds while peers raised much larger vehicles.

The Oslo-born, Nordic-rooted early-stage firm that became one of Europe's longest-running venture partnerships, best known for backing Spotify in 2008 and then repeating the pattern of conviction Series A bets on European category creators — iZettle, Trustpilot, Kahoot!, Personio, TrueLayer — before scaling to a ~€1bn fund in 2022.

The Minneapolis bank-affiliated venture fund of 1961 that became a Menlo Park multi-stage investor with a single dominant LP — Wells Fargo — using that captive, evergreen-like capital base to run early-stage venture, minority growth equity, healthcare, India and Israel strategies side by side, and to scale from ~$1.2bn funds to ~$3bn funds and ~$15.5bn of capital under management by 2024.

The New York healthcare specialist that began in 1989 as a pharmaceutical-analyst money manager and grew into one of the world's largest dedicated healthcare investors, running public equity, venture/private equity, royalty-and-credit and Asia funds side by side — a "full capital stack" model that lets it back a company from Series A through IPO and into structured debt.

The first US institutional investment firm dedicated to digital assets — a former Tiger Management macro trader's hedge fund that pivoted to bitcoin in 2013 and grew into a multi-strategy crypto manager running a bitcoin fund, liquid token funds and venture funds side by side.

The research-driven crypto investment firm founded in 2018 by a Coinbase co-founder and a Sequoia partner, which pairs venture and liquid-token investing with an in-house engineering and research team, and which became the archetype of the "technical" crypto fund — while also absorbing one of the most public losses of the cycle in FTX.

A transatlantic venture firm founded in San Francisco in 1982 as Paribas's technology venture arm, which became independent, moved its centre of gravity to Paris, and rebuilt itself after 2008 into a multi-strategy platform (seed, venture, growth, Africa, impact), best known today for backing French software and consumer companies and for running Partech Africa, one of the largest funds dedicated

The former Sequoia Capital India & Southeast Asia, which grew from a 2006 merger with WestBridge Capital into the region's largest and most active venture and growth investor (Pine Labs, Groww, Zomato, GoTo, Freshworks), weathered a 2022–23 run of portfolio governance scandals, and became an independent firm in 2023–24, with a large partner exodus following in 2024–26.

Israel's largest and longest-running domestic venture franchise: founded in 1993 as Polaris under the government's Yozma programme, it grew with the Israeli tech sector through the telecom bubble, the 2000s exit drought and the cybersecurity, adtech and AI booms, and split itself into separate early-stage, growth and healthtech funds under one brand.

The Berlin seed fund built by two former founders-turned-angels that made "B2B SaaS and marketplaces, seed only, anywhere in the world" a specialist European franchise — early in Zendesk, Delivery Hero, Revolut, Algolia, Contentful, Typeform, Loom and Chainalysis, and best known among founders for Christoph Janz's SaaS benchmarks and frameworks.

The Boston venture firm, founded in 1996 by two Burr, Egan, Deleage alumni and a Seattle partner, that built a mixed technology-and-life-sciences franchise around Akamai-era internet deals and MIT-centred company creation (most famously with Robert Langer), then narrowed its flagship to healthcare and spun its technology growth business into a separate affiliate.

The San Francisco crypto investment manager founded by Coinbase's first employee, Olaf Carlson-Wee, which pioneered the "token hedge fund plus venture" model in 2016–17, became the archetypal crypto-native backer of new Layer-1 and infrastructure protocols, and has lived through every boom and bust in the asset class since.

The Alexandria, Virginia fintech specialist founded by Capital One co-founder Nigel Morris, which brings Capital One's data-driven credit and marketing discipline to early-stage fintech and has built one of the strongest records in the sector, from Credit Karma and Nubank to SoFi, Klarna, Remitly, Flywire and a deep Latin American portfolio.

The Shanghai-based early-stage firm founded in 2006 by former Intel Capital and SoftBank investors that became one of China's top venture franchises by pairing consumer-internet bets (Xiaomi, Bilibili, Zhihu, Roborock) with a deep healthcare practice built by Nisa Leung (Tigermed, Gan & Lee, Zai Lab, CanSino), raising ~$9.5bn across 18 USD and RMB funds by 2023.

The corporate venture arm of Qualcomm, founded in 2000 to back start-ups that expand demand for wireless connectivity and, later, for Snapdragon-class computing at the edge. It invests Qualcomm balance-sheet capital through a global team in seven regions, usually as a minority co-investor and board observer. It became one of the most active corporate VCs in China and India, and its record includes

The Boston biotech specialist that started as a small public-equity fund seeded by Vertex co-founder Richard Aldrich and, under Peter Kolchinsky and Rajeev Shah, became one of the largest "crossover" investors in life sciences, using a research-heavy, evergreen hedge-fund structure alongside dedicated private (Nexus) funds to finance companies from formation through IPO and beyond.

The Menlo Park partnership formed in 1999 when early-stage partners of Brentwood Venture Capital and Institutional Venture Partners combined into a new firm — a mid-sized, infrastructure-and-developer-focused investor that has stayed deliberately smaller than the multi-stage giants, with an early-stage fund family and a separate "Omega" growth family, and outsized wins in Snowflake, Twilio, Heroku

Micky Malka's small, fintech-only Palo Alto firm that has backed many of the defining consumer-finance and crypto companies of the 2010s (Robinhood, Coinbase, Credit Karma, Nubank, Revolut, Brex, Affirm) from a deliberately tiny team, and that bet earlier and harder than almost anyone on the idea that software would rebuild financial services worldwide.

The corporate venture arm of Salesforce, which began as a way to grow the ecosystem of applications built on Salesforce's platform and became one of the most active and profitable late-stage enterprise-software investors of the 2010s and early 2020s, before reinventing itself as a large investor in generative-AI model companies (Anthropic, Cohere, Hugging Face, Mistral) from 2023.

London's original institutional first-check fund, which started in 2007 as a €2.5m "Seedcamp Week" experiment backed by Europe's leading VCs and became Europe's best-known pre-seed/seed brand — writing small first cheques into Wise, Revolut and UiPath before most investors had heard of them, and growing into a ~$1bn-AUM transatlantic seed platform by 2026.

The Menlo Park partnership that turned Don Valentine's "back the market, not just the founder" discipline into the most consistently successful franchise in venture capital (Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, WhatsApp, Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash) and then, after 2021, tried to reinvent the venture fund itself as a permanent evergreen holding vehicle while shedding its China and India/SEA arms.

Chamath Palihapitiya's Palo Alto firm. It began in 2011 as a data-driven, founder-friendly venture partnership with some of the decade's best enterprise wins (Yammer, Slack, Box, Intercom). It became the leading sponsor of the 2019–2021 SPAC boom, and since 2019 it has been a technology holding company and family office around one investor.

Masayoshi Son's investment machine. It turned a $20m bet on Alibaba (2000) into the most profitable venture investment ever recorded, then used that fortune and Gulf sovereign money to build the ~$100bn Vision Fund (2017), which redefined late-stage venture through "capital as a weapon" (Uber, DoorDash, Coupang, ByteDance). It also produced spectacular failures (WeWork, Greensill, Katerra) and, fr

A Boston-born, now Boston/New York/San Francisco partnership founded in 2005 that made its name co-investing with Union Square Ventures in Twitter and Tumblr. It stayed deliberately small and collegial, added a growth fund in 2014, and in 2023 led Anthropic's Series C, the bet that now dominates its returns and its fundraising.

Silicon Valley's oldest continuously operating venture firm (1964) and its most secretive: an evergreen, partner-capitalised fund that early-backed Nvidia and, since 2009, has made its returns by building enterprise-infrastructure companies itself — Pure Storage, Snowflake and a "Snowflake ecosystem" of incubations — with a managing director often serving as founding CEO.

Ron Conway's San Francisco seed firm, the institutional form of Silicon Valley's best-known "super angel." It wrote small, non-leading checks into hundreds of startups a year and sold founders network, crisis help and political cover rather than board governance. In the 2020s it added a growth fund.

The Boulder-born "mentorship-driven accelerator" that franchised the YC model into dozens of cities and corporate-sponsored programmes. It became the world's most prolific accelerator by number of companies, then spent 2023–2025 shrinking and restructuring back toward its founders' original playbook.

The Boston biotech venture-creation firm that three former Millennium Pharmaceuticals executives founded in 2007. It builds disease-focused companies from scratch, staffs them with its own partners as interim executives, and produced a run of exits in the 2010s (Agios, Foundation Medicine, bluebird, Sage, Blueprint, Global Blood Therapeutics) that made it the main alternative to Flagship's platfor

Josh Kushner's New York firm that grew from a $5m seed vehicle in 2009 into one of the world's largest venture managers by betting heavily on a small number of category leaders, above all OpenAI, and that now extends into AI-enabled control ownership (Thrive Holdings) and permanent capital (Thrive Eternal).

The New York "Tiger cub" hedge fund whose private-investment arm turned public-market discipline, emerging-market e-commerce bets and, later, speed and price-insensitive growth checks into one of the largest venture programmes ever, then became the defining cautionary tale of the 2021 bubble before shrinking back to small, concentrated funds.

A London-founded technology VC that reinvented itself in 2016–2017 as one of sub-Saharan Africa's leading early-stage specialists, backed largely by development-finance institutions, whose TIDE Africa funds (~$71m and ~$154m) produced visible winners on paper (Andela, Twiga, Autochek, uLesson) and equally visible lessons (Kobo360, Okra, Twiga's restructuring) through Africa's 2021 boom and 2022–20

The New York firm that made "thesis-driven" venture capital a brand — small funds, a public blog, and a long-running bet on large networks of engaged users — turning Twitter, Tumblr, Zynga, Etsy, Twilio, Duolingo and Coinbase into one of the best early-stage records of its generation, then extending the same thesis into crypto, climate and, in 2026, AI.

The Rockefeller family's venture arm, formalised in 1969, which backed Intel and Apple in its first decade, built one of the longest-running combined technology-and-healthcare venture franchises, added a public/crossover healthcare business (Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners), and today operates as an independent, mid-sized, multi-sector partnership whose brand rests more on longevity and breadt

A healthcare venture firm born in 1999 out of the Brentwood / IVP / Crosspoint reshuffle that, after a difficult post-2008 period, reinvented itself as a biotech *company-creation* shop, building startups inside its own wet-lab "Discovery Engines" in San Diego, Vancouver, Toronto, New York and Basel, and selling a run of them to large pharma (Kythera, BlueRock, Vividion, Chinook) while also produc

The accelerator that industrialised seed investing. Since 2005 it has funded large batches of very young companies on standardised, founder-friendly terms, invented the SAFE, and used a three-month programme, Demo Day and a dense alumni network to become the most powerful brand at the earliest stage of venture capital.

China's best-known angel and seed firm, founded in 2011 by New Oriental co-founders Bob Xu (Xu Xiaoping) and Victor Wang (Wang Qiang) in partnership with Sequoia Capital China. It turned Xu's personal angel investing (Jumei) into an institutional seed franchise with 750+ portfolio companies (Xiaohongshu, Perfect Diary, Mobvoi, VIPKid, ofo) and, in the AI era, early cheques into Moonshot AI and Man