The Seed 100: The best early-stage investors of 2025

Behind every great company, there was a prescient early investor who planted the seed that helped it grow into a redwood.

For Facebook, that investor was Peter Thiel. For DoorDash and Opendoor, it was Keith Rabois.

Seed-stage investors arguably have the hardest job in venture capital. They often write a check after hearing just the smallest kernel of an idea, long before there is even a product. But with the greatest risk comes the biggest reward, and some small checks have turned into life-changing fortunes.

“At the earliest stages, it’s truly all about the founder,” said Gokul Rajaram, who made his debut on the Seed 100 this year. “Great founders can take mediocre ideas and mediocre markets and either pivot or change the market, and do the right thing to change the company trajectory.”

The job has also become harder, with seed funding in the first quarter of this year dropping to its lowest level in years, according to Crunchbase, and more money going into megarounds for AI companies.

Not all seed investors are alike. Some prefer defense tech while others like to bet on consumer tech. Some look for specific founding teams while others only invest in repeat founders.

Now in its fifth year, the Seed 100 list celebrates these figures — the sage dealmakers who provide the essential first push to startups that go on to become some of the greatest successes in the tech world. This list is compiled using data analysis supplied by Termina, a software platform spun out of Tribe Capital. Read the full methodology behind the list.

1. Kevin Mahaffey

Founder, SNR Ventures

Notable investments: Sourcegraph, Benchling, Coco Robotics, Mesh, XOPS, Sublime Security

City: San Francisco

Mahaffey has experience as both a founder and investor. He started the mobile-security company Lookout when he was 22 years old. After an initial spate of rejections from venture capital firms, Lookout would close investments from venture capitalists like Chris Sacca and Vinod Khosla at a $1.7 billion valuation.

As a seed investor, Mahaffey has helped mint nearly a dozen unicorns like Lattice and People.ai. “Nothing gets me more excited than spending time with founders creating businesses that seem audacious today — but will be obvious in retrospect,” Mahaffey told BI. “I firmly believe that different + difficult = defensible.”

2. Gaurav Jain

Cofounder and managing partner, Afore Capital

Notable investments: Cruise Automation, Firebase

City: San Francisco

Jain is all about getting into startups as early as possible. In fact, his firm, Afore Capital, has the thesis that no investment is “too early,” and they’d like to get involved well before other VCs. Jain has been running the $500 million venture fund Afore since 2016, and the firm raised a $185 million fourth fund in February 2025 to continue investing in pre-seed startups.

In addition to Afore, Jain has made more than two dozen seed investments through Founder Collective, a seed-stage VC fund where he was a principal from 2012 to 2016. Those bets include Airtable, Firebase, which was acquired by Google, and Cruise Automation, which was acquired by General Motors for more than $1 billion.

3. Naval Ravikant

Entrepreneur

Notable investments: AtoB, Hebbia, Korbit, Pipe, Clearbit

City: Palo Alto, California

Ravikant has etched his mark on Silicon Valley for more than two decades. He’s perhaps best known for cofounding AngelList in 2010, the fundraising platform that helps investors connect and write checks to early-stage startups. Before that, he colaunched the consumer product review site Epinions, which later merged with another site to become the consumer price comparison website Shopping.com.

In 2007, Ravikant founded the early-stage venture firm The Hit Forge. He also made early bets on companies such as Twitter, now X, and Uber. He’s gone on to found several other companies and funds and has been a prolific angel investor in startups, including Substack, Perplexity, and Pipe.

4. Walter Kortschak

Title: Partner, Firestreak Ventures

Notable investments: Palantir, Stripe, Robinhood, Databricks, Perplexity, Anthropic

City: Aspen, Colorado and London

Kortschak’s 39 years in venture capital have been full of successful bets on companies like E-Tek Dynamics, Finisar, and McAfee. He spent more than three decades at Summit Partners, where he focused on growth-stage investing. As a private investor, he was an early investor in Trade Desk, Palantir, Stripe, and Robinhood.

“Our north star is assessing a founder’s ambition to take a disruptive big idea and imagine the potential to build a generational company,” Kortschak told BI.

He helped launch SignalFire in 2013 and started Firestreak in 2022 to invest his personal capital and write pre-seed and seed-stage checks between $50,000 and $150,000 to startups focusing on infrastructure; AI and machine learning; data; and open-source, cybersecurity, and developer tools. He has invested in buzzy AI and data startups like Anthropic, Cohere, Databricks, Hugging Face, MotherDuck, and Perplexity.

5. Bradley Horowitz

General partner, Wisdom Ventures

Notable investments: OpenAI, Anthropic, Slack, Miro, Ramp, Scale AI

City: Palo Alto, California

As vice president of product at Google for 15 years, Horowitz led teams that developed some of the company’s most important offerings, such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google News.

He left Google in 2023 to invest full time through Wisdom Ventures and as an angel investor.

Horowitz has backed more than 150 startups and already boasts four decacorns, startups valued at more than $10 billion. Those include Scale AI, Miro, Applied Intuition, and Ramp. Through Wisdom Ventures, he is also one of the few investors in two of the biggest LLM’s, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Last year, he joined the board of Circle, a global fintech company that facilitates payments. He also saw his early investment in Coda, a productivity startup, pay off when it was acquired by Grammarly.

6. Darian Shirazi

Managing partner, Gradient Ventures

Notable investments: Gigs, Legora, Krea, Numeral, Range, Writer

City: San Francisco

Shiraz, leaping 12 spots up the ranking this year, was recently elevated to managing partner at Gradient Ventures, Google’s artificial intelligence-focused venture fund.

Shirazi seeks out companies that harness machine learning to disrupt and reshape traditional industries, such as Legora for the legal industry and Numeral for fintechs and banks.

Shirazi famously became the first intern for Facebook when he was 19. Then he built a marketing tech startup, Radius, before selling it to the fintech startup Kabbage in 2019. Since then, he’s mobilized his own social network to invest in breakthrough companies.

7. Jeremy Yap

Angel investor

Notable investments: Maven Clinic, Stepful, Corti, Oura, Mojo, Meeno

City: San Francisco and London

Yap has been a full-time angel investor for over a decade, since leaving his day job in derivatives trading at Merrill Lynch in 2012. He’s invested in more than 100 startups and sits on the advisory boards of the travel management company TravelBank and the fund of funds Cendana Capital.

He splits his time between San Francisco and Europe. He’s backed startups such as the women’s healthcare company Maven Clinic, which raised $125 million in Series F funding at a $1.7 billion valuation in October, and the smart ring maker Oura, which raised a $200 million Series D round at a $5.2 billion valuation in December.

8. Sam Altman

Title: Cofounder and CEO, OpenAI

Notable investments: Asana, Cerebras, Reddit, Stripe, Uber

City: San Francisco

Before he was the J. Robert Oppenheimer of our age, Altman was a red-letter startup investor.

Since Altman left his post at Y Combinator in 2019, he’s plunged his personal wealth and outside capital into companies working on nuclear energy (Oklo and Helion), supersonic passenger planes (Boom Supersonic), and therapies to delay aging (Retro Biosciences).

While OpenAI made Altman famous, his investments have made him a billionaire. As an investor in Reddit, Altman and his related funds saw a cash windfall from its initial public offering last year.

9. Garry Tan

President and CEO, Y Combinator

Notable investments: Coinbase, Cruise, Flexport, Instacart, Rippling, Truepill

City: San Francisco

Tan plays father to thousands of startups a year as the president of Y Combinator, but it was his previous investments at Initialized Capital that made him a top-ranked seed investor. He funded Coinbase in 2012. He invested $300,000 and ended up with shares worth over $2.4 billion.

Since taking over Y Combinator in 2022, Tan has ushered in a new, harder-charging era at the accelerator. It moved its headquarters to San Francisco, doubled the number of startup cohorts it supports a year, and steered the latest cohort to become the most profitable in the firm’s history.

10. Lachy Groom

Cofounder, Physical Intelligence

Notable investments: Notion, Figma, Anduril, Deel, Humane

City: San Francisco

Groom was an early Stripe employee and led Stripe Issuing, the team in charge of virtual and physical cards. He left the fintech in 2018 and last year cofounded Physical Intelligence, an AI startup with the goal of bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world via spatially intelligent robots. The startup raised $400 million last fall from Jeff Bezos, Thrive Capital, and OpenAI.

Groom is also an angel investor, having raised around $100 million in 2020 for his second fund, LFG II. His investments include Notion and Figma.

11. Keith Rabois

Managing director, Khosla Ventures

Notable investments: YouTube, Airbnb, Lyft, Palantir, DoorDash, Ramp

Location: Miami

Rabois made a fortune investing his own money in iconic companies like YouTube, Airbnb, and Palantir. He returned to Khosla Ventures last year after four years at Founders Fund. During his first stint at Khosla, Rabois led the firm’s early investments in DoorDash, Affirm, and Stripe.

A vocal proponent of Miami’s tech scene, Rabois also cofounded and still serves as CEO of OpenStore, a Khosla-backed e-commerce company.

12. Daniel Gross

Cofounder, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Notable investments: Instacart, Coinbase, GitHub, Figma, Notion, Deel, Rippling

City: San Francisco

Gross has invested in multiple startups, often with his fellow Seed 100 honoree Nat Friedman, with whom he started the billion-dollar AI fund C2 Investment, where the two acquired more than 2,000 Nvidia chips to distribute alongside venture funds. He’s backed big companies such as Instacart, Notion, and Figma, as well as Gusto and Character.ai.

Gross is also a serial entrepreneur and currently working on Safe Superintelligence, a startup he cofounded with Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy that’s so far raised $1 billion from NFDG, a16z, Sequoia, and other investors. He previously cofounded Cue, a search engine that was acquired by Apple in 2013.

Gross is a former Y Combinator partner who started the accelerator’s AI program.

13. Arjun Sethi

Chairman, Tribe Capital; co-CEO, Kraken

Notable investments: Apollo, Applied Intuition, Block, Carta, Snapchat

City: Menlo Park, California

Instead of relying on gut feelings alone, Sethi takes a data-driven approach to seed investing. His firm, Tribe Capital, uses artificial intelligence and data analysis to predict which early-stage companies are most likely to become unicorns.

This approach has led to breakout investments such as Applied Intuition, the autonomous vehicle software company that was last valued at $6 billion, and Rippling, the workforce management software company that’s raised nearly $1 billion in equity financing to date.

Sethi added a new role last year as co-chief executive of the cryptocurrency platform Kraken.

14. Gokul Rajaram

Founding partner, Marathon Management Partners

Notable investments: Deel, BetterUp, Figma, Printify, Boon, Atlas

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Rajaram was an early employee at Alphabet and Meta and most recently, an executive at DoorDash. He now uses his wallet and expertise to help startups scale. After years of angel investing, he plans to write checks through a new firm, Marathon Management Partners.

“I look for relentless and obsessed founders who are ambitious and aggressive, who have unique insights into their space, understand what takes to win in their space better than anyone on the planet, and who want to build a generational company,” Rajaram told BI.

Rajaram also sits on the boards of Coinbase, Pinterest, and Trade Desk.

15. Dalton Caldwell

Managing partner, Y Combinator

Notable investments: Brex, PostHog, Rappi, Retool, Whatnot, Zip

City: San Francisco

During his time at Y Combinator, Caldwell has put his stamp on more than 35 unicorn startups, including DoorDash, Flexport, Brex, and Deel. A former founder himself, Caldwell joined the storied startup accelerator as a full-time partner in 2014. Since then, he’s racked up more than 6,500 office hours with founders over the course of 25 batches.

Caldwell is also one of the accelerator’s gatekeepers, overseeing the admissions process. He’s said that two things he looks for in an application are technical prowess and a clear explanation of why the founder is the right person to start the business of their choosing.

16. Alexis Ohanian

General partner and founder, Seven Seven Six

Notable investments: Angel City Football Club, Feastables, Flock Safety, Riverside, Ro

City: Jupiter, Florida

Before he married a tennis superstar and became Mr. Serena Williams, Ohanian was known as the “mayor of the internet.” He cofounded Reddit and scaled it to become one of the most popular websites worldwide. Since he sold the company, he’s plunged his personal wealth and venture funds into companies building in the blockchain, software, and healthcare industries.

In 2020, Ohanian left the firm he cofounded, Initialized Capital, to launch yet another venture fund. Between Ohanian and his Seven Seven Six founding partner, Katelin Holloway, the fund has backed a number of startups led by women and people of color, including the group coaching platform The Grand and maternal telehealth solution ​​Poppy Seed Health.

17. Ben Ling

Founder and general partner, Bling Capital

Notable investments: GitHub, Rippling, Airtable, Spellbook, Noetica

City: Miami

Ling was a general partner at Khosla Ventures before launching Bling Capital, a VC firm focused on seed and Series A investments. Ling has also served in senior operating roles at Google, YouTube, and Facebook and was an active angel investor, nabbing early stakes in Airtable, Lyft, Square, Palantir, and Quora.

In 2024, one of Bling’s early investments, Printify, grew 100 times the firm’s entry valuation and merged with Printful to become one of the largest print-on-demand platforms globally. As for what Ling looks for in an entrepreneur, he said he seeks a founder with “the right level of obstinance, an earned secret about a space, and an innate drive to learn it all.”

18. Jon Soberg

CEO and managing partner, MS&AD Ventures

Notable investments: Yotpo, Mercury, Flex, Rubrik, ValidMind, Plus Platform

City: Palo Alto, California

This is Soberg’s fifth straight year on the Seed 100, a position he’s maintained due in part to the seven IPOs and 19 unicorns in his portfolio. His many bets include the marketing platform Yotpo, the business banking fintech Mercury, and Rubrik, the cloud cybersecurity company that went public last year.

Soberg has been leading MS&AD Ventures since 2018. His firm focuses on early-stage startups and invests across insuretech, AI, Internet of Things, big data, and cybersecurity.

For Soberg, success means finding companies that can weather tough conditions — not just shine when the market is great.

“Building in tougher markets makes people focus extra diligently, and we see really responsible growth, great unit economics, and people tackling very tough problems,” he told BI.

19. Julian Counihan

Title: General partner, Schematic Ventures

Notable Investments: Altana, Harbinger, Plus One Robotics, P-1 AI, Infinitform, Chassy

City: San Francisco

Counihan is a general partner at Schematic Ventures, an early-stage firm that invests in supply chain, manufacturing, and enterprise software startups. Before Schematic, Counihan worked at Red Sea Ventures, where he invested in industrial hardware and supply chain companies, and in tech investment banking at Citi. He started his career as a software engineer at Fortna, a logistics company.

“The first wave of industrial startups brought world-class engineering talent into supply chain and manufacturing,” Counihan told BI. “Engineers from those companies are now launching startups building from first principles and creating entirely new systems for how the physical world operates. There is more energy, talent and capital working on industrial technology than ever before.”

20. Micah Rosenbloom

Managing partner, Founder Collective

Notable investments: Hawthorne, Kasa, Lovevery, Socure, Talos, Verkada,

City: New York

Rosenbloom and his firm, Founder Collective, are the picture of founder-friendly investors. The seed-stage shop forsakes pro rata rights, helping to avoid “signaling risk” in the market, and eggs on founders to raise as little money as possible, even if it hurts the markups on their deals.

Rosenbloom, a three-time founder himself, invests across sectors and has backed everything from security systems to pet DNA tests. He co-leads Founder Collective’s New York office.

21. Ed Sim

Founder and general partner, Boldstart Ventures

Notable investments: BigID, Common Paper, Kustomer, Protect AI, Snyk, Tessl

City: Miami

Sim thrives in one of the riskiest corners of the market: He invests in startups before they even incorporate. The self-described “inception investor” prefers to roll up his sleeves and work with founders to shape their ideas, close their first hires, and rally the all-important early adopters.

While Sim’s portfolio has produced monster exits such as Kustomer’s $1 billion sale to Meta, his biggest successes may be ahead. In 2016, Sim wrote one of the first checks into Snyk, the developer-security unicorn startup that’s eyeing a potential initial public offering, TechCrunch reported. He also backed Snyk founder Guy Podjarny’s latest company, the white-hot coding platform Tessl.

22. Scott Belsky

Partner, A24

Notable investments: Airtable, Clay, KoBold, Meter, Pinterest, Ramp, Uber

City: New York

A longtime Adobe executive and creative virtuoso, Belsky left the design software company earlier this year for the role of a lifetime: He joined A24 as a partner, leading tech and innovation projects at the independent studio. In a social media post announcing the move, Belsky pledged to “continue supporting founders as an investor/product advisor” and board member.

One of the bright spots in his portfolio is the fintech Ramp. Founded in 2019, the corporate card and software provider boasts hundreds of millions in annualized revenue and a $13 billion valuation.

23. Ryan Hoover

Founder and general partner, Weekend Fund

Notable investments: Atlys, Deel, Extropic, Justpoint, Luminai, Pipe, Truemed

City: Miami, New York, and San Francisco

Hoover built the launchpad for startups with Product Hunt, a website for sharing and discovering the latest mobile apps and tech creations. Now, as an investor, he’s transformed his network of thousands of founders into a sourcing engine for finding and investing in the next big thing.

His portfolio includes Deel, the human resources software provider that closed $30 million in new funding earlier this year, and the embedded finance platform Pipe.

24. Avichal Garg

Managing partner, Electric Capital

Notable investments: Aven, Bitwise, Figma, Kraken, Notion, Pulley

City: Palo Alto, California

The spectacular collapse of crypto exchanges like FTX and Binance has cast a long shadow over the broader crypto market. But Garg and the fund he founded, Electric Capital, are continuing to bet big on decentralized and blockchain-based technologies.

In addition to his work with Electric, Garg has been a successful angel investor for over a decade, having been an early backer of Cruise, Deel, and Figma. He also worked at both Facebook and Google and founded multiple startups of his own before getting into investing.

25. Laura Rippy

Managing partner and board member, Alumni Ventures

Notable investments: Daydream, Rent App, Barnwell Bio, Atomic Supply, TRM Labs, Believer.gg,

City: Boston

Rippy says that when the world is chaotic, startups are the most nimble, which is why she’s excited for this year.

“The pattern of 2025 so far is highly talented teams tackling big opportunities,” she told BI.

Based in Boston, Rippy has built a large network of school-related founders and investors. She runs two school-centric funds, Green D at Dartmouth College and Yard Ventures at Harvard, and she’s also the managing partner of Alumni Ventures, one of the most active VC firms in the world. Alumni brings VC investing to individual investors’ portfolios and manages more than 650,000 members.

Prior to joining Alumni Ventures in 2017, Rippy spent 14 years at the private family office Ripplecreek Partners.

26. William Hockey

CEO, Column

Notable investments: Deel, Metronome, Tropic, TryNow, Middesk

City: San Francisco

Hockey worked briefly in consulting at Bain before cofounding Plaid, a fintech infrastructure company, with Zach Perret in 2012. He spent eight years at Plaid as the president and chief technology officer before leaving in 2019.

In 2022, he announced what he’d been building since leaving Plaid: a federally chartered banking startup called Column that allows developers to build financial products faster. Hockey is the cofounder and CEO of Column. He’s also a prolific fintech investor who’s backed companies such as Moov and the payroll startup Deel, according to PitchBook data.

27. Alex Iskold

Founder and partner, 2048 Ventures

Notable investments: GlossGenius, Aerodome, Gorgias, Mantl, Healthie, Nomic Bio

City: New York

Iskold immigrated to the US from Ukraine when he was 19 and has built a long and successful career as a founder, software engineer, and investor in over 150 startups. He’s also a prolific blogger on his site Startup Hacks. Earlier this year, one of 2048 Ventures’ early bets, the fintech Mantl, was acquired by Alkemi for $400 million. “AI was and is an arms race. Instead of horizontal plays, we focus on the vertical value capture, full solves, and strong data moats,” Iskold told BI. “On the macro level, capital is scarce both for startups and emerging managers. We view this as a very positive net dynamic for the space as there is less noise in general and more value creation.”

28. Nat Friedman

Former CEO, GitHub

Notable investments: Figma, Stripe, Deel, Magic, Perplexity, The Bot Company

City: San Francisco

A multi-time founder, Friedman’s second software startup was acquired by Microsoft in 2016, paving the way for him to become GitHub’s CEO in 2018, when the tech giant bought the coding company for $7.5 billion. Friedman stayed in the top spot at GitHub for three years and stepped down in 2021.

Over the past few years, Friedman has become well known as an investor backing startups like Figma, Stripe, and Perplexity, and often cowrites checks with Daniel Gross. The two acquired more than 2,000 Nvidia chips and distributed them along with venture funding through one of their funds, the billion-dollar AI fund C2 Investment.

29. Ali Partovi

Founder and CEO, Neo

Notable investments: Anysphere, Kalshi, Vanta, Cobot, Bluesky, Chai Discovery

City: San Francisco

Partovi sold his previous company to Microsoft for $265 million and was an early investor and advisor to dozens of startups, including Zappos and Airbnb. He now runs Neo, a startup incubator, venture fund, and professional network. Neo identifies promising individuals, often while they’re still in school, and provides them with mentorship, education, job placement, and, in some cases, investment.

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One of Neo’s graduates, the AI coding startup and Cursor developer Anysphere, recently raised over $100 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. The startup also became one of the fastest companies ever to reach $100 million in annualized revenue, Partovi, who was its first investor, said. “At Neo, we’re obsessed with investing in people. Our Neo Scholars program identifies future tech leaders when they’re still in college, long before they start a company.”

30. Max Mullen

Title: Cofounder, Instacart

Notable investments: Census, Alt, Caper, Verifiable, Pelago

City: San Francisco

Mullen cofounded the delivery giant Instacart, which went public in 2023. He’s also been a prolific seed investor, backing over 100 startups, including Lattice, Checkr, Omni, Mercury, and Pelago. He’s also backed a number of startups founded by Instacart alums, such as Anomalo, Ascend, Cabal, Highstock, and Monocle. Among Mullen’s advice to founders: “Every minute counts.”

31. Salil Deshpande

General partner, Uncorrelated Ventures

Notable investments: Redis, Fingerprint, Astranis, Dynatrace, MuleSoft, Stashfin

City: Palo Alto, California

Deshpande has generally preferred to focus on technical founders who are building companies in infrastructure software. As it has become clear that AI can write software code, he has focused more on hardware and space investments, which he sees are more defensible.

Two of his biggest wins have been Redis, a data platform he says crossed $300 million in annual recurring revenue, and LucidLink, a cloud storage tool he says he invested in before it had any product and has now crossed $40 million in ARR.

Prior to founding Uncorrelated Ventures, Deshpande worked at Bain Capital Ventures for seven years and Bay Partners for seven years before that.

32. Shruti Gandhi

Title: Founder and general partner, Array Ventures

Notable investments: Capsule, Eventual Computing, Mozart Data, Placer.ai, Rad AI, Runway.team

City: San Francisco

Gandhi’s track record shows she gets results for limited partners. In under a decade, the solo capitalist has returned her first $7 million fund at a fivefold multiple, with more companies still waiting to exit. A stream of acquisitions has sped along those distributions, including Simility, a fraud-detection company which sold to PayPal in 2018, just two years after Gandhi invested.

As a one-time startup founder, Gandhi decided to raise a fund in 2016 because she saw a need for more investors who rolled up their sleeves at the seed stage. Her fund, Array Ventures, helps technical founders close early sales and develop their go-to-market sales strategy.

33. Ramy Adeeb

Founder and general partner, 1984 Ventures

Notable investments: PostHog, Postscript, BuildOps, Collaborative Robotics, Fay Nutrition, Cline

City: New York

Adeeb was hooked on the startup world after joining the speech recognition tech startup TellMe Networks in 2000 as the company’s head of enterprise engineering. Seven years later, TellMe sold to Microsoft, and Adeeb spent two years as a principal at Khosla Ventures before starting his own company. He sold that venture, the web curation tool Snip.it, to Yahoo in 2013.

Adeeb founded 1984 Ventures in 2017 to invest in early-stage tech startups. This year, he’s particularly excited about his investment in Cline, which he said was stealing away customers from highly funded AI coding editors like Anysphere’s Cursor and Windsurf for its competing product, built by a single engineer. Cline hadn’t publicly announced its funding as of April.

Another of Adeeb’s investments, the commercial contracting software BuildOps, raised a $127 million Series C round in March at a valuation of $1 billion.

34. Elad Gil

Angel investor

Notable investments: Anduril, Braintrust, Harvey, Notion, Perplexity

City: San Francisco

When it comes to evaluating seed-stage startups, Gil says that the potential for product-market fit is the most important thing he’s looking for when deciding whether to write a check.

This strategy has proved fruitful, with Gil making early bets on AI legaltech darling Harvey, the workplace productivity suite Notion, the AI search engine Perplexity, and the defense tech company Anduril, along with several other buzzy startups that have since become heavy hitters.

A longtime angel investor, Gil has also written checks for Airbnb, Coinbase, Figma, Deel, and a slew of other startups. He was previously an executive at Twitter, now known as X, and worked in product management at Google.

35. Kunal Bahl

Cofounder, Titan Capital

Notable investments: Ola, Urban Company, Mamaearth, OfBusiness, Unicommerce, Credgenics

City: New Delhi

Bahl cofounded one of India’s hottest startups, Snapdeal, which was once valued at $6.5 billion. Snapdeal’s parent company, the SoftBank-backed Unicommerce, went public in 2024 and was the first software-as-a-service company to go public in India. When the company went public, it was the second-most-subscribed IPO of the year.

“Outside of the usual help a portfolio company would expect from any seasoned investor, one area we are very focused on is ensuring discipline around maintaining a thoughtful, well-structured monthly MIS that is discussed within the startup’s leadership and with our team at Titan Capital,” Bahl said, referring to a management information system report. “This ensures everyone — internal and external stakeholders — is always on the same page with respect to the direction the business is headed.”

36. Marlon Nichols

Cofounder and managing general partner, MaC Venture Capital

Notable investments: Thrive Market, Pipe, Finesse, Purestream, Seed Health, Truebill

City: Los Angeles

​​Nichols started his career as an operator at a seed-stage startup, helped scale it, and then transitioned to consulting. But while that career was fulfilling, he felt that something was missing. He wanted to collaborate with executives and decision-makers and be close to the latest technology. For Nichols, the answer was venture capital. He started in VC at Intel Capital and then cofounded Cross Culture Ventures. That firm then merged with another to form MaC Venture Capital in 2021, which raised $110 million for its first fund and followed that up with a second $203 million fund.

In 2024, Mac closed on another $150 million fund, its third in four years. Nichols said this “reflects our impact as a seed-stage firm, the strength of our thesis and the founders we back” and “cements MaC as one of the largest seed-stage firms in Los Angeles and North America.”

Nicholas said the new fund had allowed the firm to continue to expand in areas such as energy, sustainability, defense, and hard tech, sectors the firm believes “are at an inflection point and poised for outsized impact and returns.”

37. Marc Benioff

Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

Notable Investments: Wiz, You.com, Artera AI, Warp, LearnLux, Zebra Medical Vision

City: San Francisco

Benioff caught the startup bug as a summer intern at Apple in the summer of 1984, writing assembly code for the Macintosh 68000 Development System. Fast-forward a few decades, and he’s running Salesforce, a 75,000-person Fortune 500 giant.

Seed stage investing isn’t his day job, but Benioff says he’s drawn to founders because he relates to them. He estimates that over the past 20 years, he’s backed more than 200 seed-stage startups. Founders in his portfolio don’t just get cash — they also get access to his playbook for scaling and his deep network of executives and operators.

The key signal he looks for in a founder? Shared vision. “Do I have a complementary vision to how they see their own company?” Benioff told BI. “Many of these people are visionaries. They’re seeing things that don’t exist. Am I also able to see what they’re seeing?”

Beyond his personal investing, Benioff also oversees TIME Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. One of its biggest wins: a roughly $600 million return from Wiz’s $32 billion acquisition, Benioff told BI. Salesforce Ventures first invested in the cybersecurity startup’s Series B in June 2021.

38. Scott Dorsey

Managing partner, High Alpha

Notable investments: Narvar, Zylo, Logik.ai, Lessonly, Superside

City: Indianapolis

Dorsey has been at the helm of the Indianapolis-based venture studio High Alpha since 2015, which he cofounded with his fellow Salesforce alums Eric Tobias and Mike Fitzgerald and the serial entrepreneur Kristian Andersen. Before getting into venture, Dorsey cofounded the marketing SaaS company ExactTarget and led the company as its CEO through an IPO, public market debut, and subsequent sale to Salesforce for $2.5 billion in 2013. Dorsey said that experience as a founder and longtime CEO had served him well as he guides the next generation of entrepreneurs.

“With my ExactTarget journey from startup founder to public company CEO, I pride myself on being a great partner and sounding board to our founders,” he told BI. “I enjoy contributing to important strategic decisions as well as supporting founders with the everyday challenges they encounter.”

39. Alex McIsaac

Founder and general partner, Northside Ventures

Notable investments: Ledn, AutoLeap, Draft, Float Financial, Clutch

City: Toronto

Before launching Northside Ventures, a pre-seed and seed stage firm based in Toronto, McIsaac cofounded an energy storage-focused cleantech startup in 2012 that Blackstone Energy bought in 2018. He transitioned to VC and landed at BDC Capital, the largest venture firm in Canada, where he worked on its seed and women in tech funds. He also led the Canadian investment practice as a partner at Global Founders Capital, a European venture firm.

40. Rohit Bansal

Cofounder, Titan Capital

Notable investments: Ola, Urban Company, Mamaearth, OfBusiness, Unicommerce, Credgenics, Giva, Shadowfax

City: New Delhi

Bansal, along with his fellow Seed 100 honoree Kunal Bahl, cofounded one of India’s hottest startups, Snapdeal, which was once valued at $6.5 billion. The SoftBank-backed Unicommerce, also cofounded by Bansal and Snapdeal’s parent company, went public in 2024 and was the first SaaS company to go public in India.

“India is on a rising tide — we will be the third-largest economy very soon — and all boats are being lifted in this significant and positive evolution the country is going through,” Bansal said. “We are witnessing tremendous innovation in AI applications being built in India, not only for the Indian market but also for global customers. We anticipate this trend to accelerate in 2025.”

41. Anshu Sharma

Cofounder and CEO, Skyflow

Notable investments: AirMDR, Ema, Ikigai Labs, Zus Health, Zinc Labs, Fold Health

City: Mountain View, California

Sharma has been writing checks to early-stage startups for over a decade, but his investing motto has remained the same: Always be closest to the smartest people you know.

This rule scored him an investment in Nutanix, as he knew the cloud-computing startup’s CEO from his years at Oracle. Nutanix went public in 2016, valued at over $5 billion.

In the past year, he wrote checks to AirMDR, an AI for security company, as well as Ema, an agentic AI startup building universal AI employees. Two of his early investments, Razorpay and Tekion, are seen as likely IPO candidates.

As a three-time founder, Sharma relates personally to the entrepreneurs he works with. Barracuda Networks bought his company Clearedin in January 2022.

42. Joe Montana

Title: Managing partner, Liquid 2 Ventures

Notable Investments: GitLab, Rippling, Applied Intuition, Anduril, Mercury, Reducto

City: San Francisco

After a Hall of Fame career as quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, Montana cofounded HRJ Capital, a fund of funds, in 1999. After a few years of angel investing and learning from the “super angel” Ron Conway, Montana launched Liquid 2 Ventures, which invests in industries as varied as B2B SaaS and defense tech, in 2015. The firm recently closed on a new $100 million fund, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

Montana says that, like football, venture capital is a long game: “At Liquid 2 Ventures, we’re committed to being lifetime investors,” he told BI. “We look for potential in founders, and aim to be a partner to them throughout their lifetime, not just for one lifecycle. Many of the most successful companies in our portfolio are from founders who are on their second or third company.”

43. Dylan Field

CEO, Figma

Notable investments: Warp, Pattern Biosciences, Retro, Conception Bio, The Browser Company

City: Penngrove, California

Field has carved out time to make angel investments across different verticals, including the DNA startup Pattern Biosciences and The Browser Company, a consumer startup building the internet browser, Arc.

He’s vetting startups and writing checks in addition to running Figma, the late-stage collaborative design startup he cofounded in 2012 with Evan Wallace. The company has raised more than $300 million from VCs and was in talks to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion in 2022 before the deal fell apart. In April, the company confidentially filed draft paperwork for an IPO.

44. Justin Mateen

Title: Founding partner, Jam Fund

Notable investments: Deel, Hadrian, Kalshi, Radiant Nuclear, Rain AI, Varda

City: Los Angeles

Mateen is best known as the cofounder of Tinder, the OG dating app. Now, he swipes right on startups as a savvy early investor in companies like Lyft, which went public in 2019 at a $24 billion valuation, and Brex, which had a $12.3 billion valuation in January 2022.

Mateen told BI he looks for founders with “serious domain expertise who have something to prove to themselves, the world, or someone they care deeply about” and companies that are disrupting large markets and have a clear path to positive-unit economics at scale.

45. Ali Tamaseb

General partner, DCVC

Notable investments: StarkWare, ElectronX, Odyssey, Earth AI, Chai Discovery

City: Palo Alto, California

Before landing at DCVC, Tamaseb cofounded and was the CEO of Blocks Wearables, a deep-tech hardware startup that developed wearables for industrial use. He also runs the networking community Super Founders Club, which includes founders with prior meaningful exits and IPOs. Tamaseb told BI that in the past year, he’d been able to grow the community “2x.” It allows Tamaseb to get access and find the best and most promising founders.

“My style of investing is 100% founder-first and founder-centric,” he said. “I use data, and an institutional way of creating networks to find, fund, and partner with the best founders of our generation at pre-seed, seed, A, and beyond.”

46. Sheel Mohnot

Cofounder and general partner, Better Tomorrow Ventures

Notable investments: Mercury, Kin, Unit, Relay, Coast, Basis

City: San Francisco

Mohnot has been featured on the Seed 100 every year since its inception four years ago. In 2020, he cofounded Better Tomorrow Ventures, a fintech venture firm. Before that, he was an angel investor in companies such as Flexport and Ironclad. He’s been investing in fintech since 2015 and cofounded the food company Thistle before starting his venture capital career.

Mohnot is excited about the prospects for fintech this year. “We had 10 markups over the course of a month earlier this year — fintech is back!” he said.

His firm specializes in helping startups with sales, recruiting, business development, community building, and raising money for the next round of funding, he said, adding that it had introduced founders to their next-round investors more than 90% of the time.

47. Nick Candito

Cofounder and managing director, ACOF

Notable investments: Carta, TrueMed, Metafy, Augment Markets, Atomic Insights, BRM

Cities: Austin and San Francisco

Candito started his career as an operator in the Boston startup scene before heading west to join the sales data startup RelateIQ, which Salesforce bought for $390 million in 2014. He then founded and served as the CEO of the cloud-based enterprise startup Progressly, which Box acquired in 2018.

Candito spent some time at Box and other startups before moving on to investing in startups, including the data importing company Flatfile. He also launched the firm Netshire Technology, and in 2020, he cofounded Angel Collective Opportunity Fund, of which he’s the managing director. ACOF helps emerging managers back startups through a pooled investment fund.

Candito said he was very excited about his investments over the past year in several AI infrastructure startups, including Gable, Distributional, Letta (formerly MemGPT), TensorWave, and Fiddler AI.

48. Eric Tarczynski

Title: Founder and managing partner, Contrary

Notable investments: Ramp, Zepto, Moment, Doss, Hermeus, Anduril

City: San Francisco

Tarczynski founded Contrary in 2017 to identify exceptional entrepreneurs early, sometimes before they’ve even begun their next venture. The firm, which invests in early-stage tech companies, is backed by the founders of tech powerhouses such as Tesla, Reddit, Facebook, and Airbnb. Contrary’s portfolio includes tech unicorns such as the defense tech startup Anduril, the Indian grocery delivery company Zepto, and the fintech platform Ramp.

Tarczynski began his own entrepreneurial journey in 2012 with Checkit, a restaurant mobile payments startup that folded after two years of competing against Toast — which Tarczynski describes as an invaluable learning opportunity. He was also an early employee at the social platform Kamcord, whose team was acqui-hired by Lyft in 2017.

49. Jackson Moses

Title: Founder and managing partner, Silent Ventures

Notable investments: Saronic, CHAOS, Armada, Gallatin AI, Firestorm, UNION

City: Dallas

Moses is a prolific defense tech investor, with some of the buzziest startups, such as the autonomous maritime company Saronic Technologies and the defense detection startup CHAOS, in his portfolio. He started his venture fund, which invests in aerospace, defense, and national security companies, in late 2022.

Previously, Moses angel invested across multiple verticals and cut his teeth starting companies of his own: He founded MainStreet, a corporate tax software company, and Spectrum Labs, a content moderation startup.

50. Roger Chen

Title: Partner, Silverton Partners

Notable investments: Apprentice, Billie, Docjuris, Grocery TV, Rx Redefined, Valid8 Financial

City: Austin

Chen moved to Austin six years ago to become a partner at the early-stage investment firm Silverton Partners. He told BI that he tends to “gravitate toward category creators” when evaluating a startup before investing.

That’s evidenced by his portfolio of local software and consumer businesses that have become the envy of Silicon Hills, with stakes in Apprentice, Fama, and Grocery TV (formerly Clerk). Chen also received a sizable exit with Edgewell’s purchase of the razor maker Billie for $310 million in 2021.

Chen said that in the past year, his portfolio company Rx Redefined had “performed consistently ahead of plan and capped off the year with a Series B.” And he’s very excited about another of his portfolio companies, the legaltech AI startup DocJuris, which he said “has been able to out-innovate and win deals against peers with significantly more funding.”

51. Martin Tobias

Managing partner, Incisive Ventures

Notable investments: Jeeves, OpenSea, Enable, Yassir, Portside, LMNT

City: Seattle

Tobias is a serial entrepreneur and investor who’s been in the game for nearly 30 years. After stints at Accenture and Microsoft, Tobias ventured out on his own to launch two companies, and he led several others during the early 2000s. He says that over the years, he’s invested in more than 250 companies as an angel investor, and he’s a limited partner in at least a dozen venture funds.

Tobias started Incisive Ventures, a pre-seed fund based in Seattle, in 2020, and he was an early investor in the fintech startup Jeeves, the NFT platform OpenSea, and the electrolyte drink mix company LMNT. He’s particularly excited about the recent wave of AI advancement and all of the startups capitalizing on the technology. “I am most excited about the companies that are seizing this AI moment to deliver whole new categories of B2B applications versus AI paste-ons,” he said.

52. Bill Trenchard

Partner, First Round Capital

Notable investments: Uber, Looker, Verkada, EvolutionIQ, Flexport, Dyna Robotics

Cities: San Francisco and Seattle

Trenchard was an entrepreneur for more than two decades, starting five companies and backing many more as an angel investor. In 2012, he joined First Round Capital, the seed-stage firm founded by Josh Kopelman and Howard Morgan.

In the past year, several of Trenchard’s portfolio companies have seen continued success. The insurtech startup EvolutionIQ, one of Trenchard’s portfolio companies that he backed in 2019, was bought for $730 million. The security tech startup Verkada raised a $200 million round, valuing it at $4.5 billion.

Trenchard said that in his years as an investor, he’d looked for “founders who are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to make customers successful.” He recalled that eight years ago, Verkada CEO Filip Kaliszan got up on a ladder at midnight to install cameras at the Equinox in Beverly Hills. Kaliszan “recently revisited the site and found those original cameras still in use — with the customer just as happy,” he said. “That level of founder commitment and obsession with making customers successful, no matter what it takes, is a powerful indicator.

53. Itamar Novick

Founder and general partner, Recursive Ventures

Notable investments: Deel, Placer AI, May Mobility, Akash Network, Tomato AI, Anjuna Security

City: Berkeley, California

Novick makes seed investments through Recursive Ventures, the firm he launched in 2014 as a solo capitalist. He announced its third fund in February, with $30 million to back pre-seed startups primarily based in the US and Israel and focused on industry disruption with data and AI.

He started Recursive while still working at Life360, where he was a member of the location-sharing app’s founding team. He stayed at Life360 in various roles until its 2024 IPO, for which he served as its acting chief financial officer and general counsel. Before that, he was on the founding team of the customer identity management startup Gigya, which the German company SAP acquired for $350 million in 2017.

Novick has invested in more than 100 startups since 2010. He’s particularly excited about his 2024 investment in Perspective AI, which lets founders simulate conversations with their customers — a tool he said he would’ve loved to have used when he was an operator.

54. Raymond Tonsing

Title: Founder and managing partner, Caffeinated Capital

Notable investments: Saronic, Varda, Airtable, Affirm, Opendoor, Clipboard Health

City: San Francisco

After working in real estate investing, Tonsing switched to tech in 2009 when he founded Caffeinated Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm in San Francisco. He’s backed companies like the online payments startup WePay, which JPMorgan acquired, and the app development startup Parse, which Meta bought in 2013.

Tonsing also saw success with the fintech company Affirm, which went public in 2021 at a valuation of over $10 billion, and Airtable, which was valued at $11 billion in 2021.

He was an early investor in Varda Space, which aims to develop pharmaceutical components in space, and serves on its board.

55. Andreas Klinger

Title: Solo general partner, Prototype Capital

Notable investments: Remote, Luma AI, Circle, Zed, PierSight Space, Sensmore

City: Berlin

Klinger was a founding member and chief technology officer of the product launch website Product Hunt before it was acquired by AngelList in 2017. He worked at AngelList and its subsidiary CoinList while also investing in pre-seed and seed-stage companies such as Hopin, Clubhouse, and Remote. In 2024, he launched the solo fund Prototype Capital.

Klinger says that in the past year, he’s been one of the core people behind a movement to establish a Pan-European legal entity that hopes to fix most of the hurdles to early-stage funding in Europe. The proposal has gotten the backing of the Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison and the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham.

56. Lucas Vaz

Title: Founder and general partner, Ravelin Capital

Notable Investments: Apex Space, Base Power, Covenant, Hadrian, The Lumber Manufactory, Shinkei Systems

City: San Francisco

Vaz founded his venture firm, Ravelin Capital, which backs early-stage startups building “critical software,” with bets largely in the industrial, defense, and manufacturing sectors. Vaz was motivated to found Ravelin after noticing “the decay of our infrastructure, the collapse of our institutions, and the changing geopolitical tides,” he wrote in a note on the firm’s website. Previously, Vaz worked as an investor at Village Global, an early-stage venture firm.

“From manufacturing and defense to other sectors such as industrials, energy, fishing, and lumber, we’re witnessing an unprecedented wave of world-class talent pouring into sectors that have long been overlooked,” Vaz told BI. “These entrepreneurs aren’t chasing trends — they’re committing their lives to rebuilding the systems that matter most.”

57. Jeff Fluhr

Venture partner, Craft Ventures

Notable investments: Warby Parker, Twilio, Houzz, CrewAI, Arch, Pickle

City: San Francisco

Fluhr dropped out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business to cofound StubHub in 2000 and served as the company’s CEO until its sale to eBay in 2007. He then launched the social video platform Spreecast, which shut down in 2016, and joined Craft Ventures a few years later. In March, Fluhr announced in a LinkedIn post that he was transitioning to a new chapter as a venture partner at the firm after seven years as a general partner.

As an investor, Fluhr has backed companies including Warby Parker and Houzz, and other unicorns, including Course Hero, MDLive, and Trulia. Out of his investments in the past year, Fluhr is particularly excited about the AI agent startup CrewAI, which he said was “the leading open source framework for AI agent orchestration, an area that is already having a huge impact on Fortune 500 companies and will only grow in importance over the next five years.”

58. Kevin Durant

Title: Cofounder, Thirty Five Ventures

Notable investments: Goalsetter, StarStock, Hugging Face, Helm.ai, Lively

City: New York

Durant is best known as a star in the NBA, winning back-to-back championships with the Golden State Warriors in 2017 and 2018. But few realize that Durant is also a prolific investor through Thirty Five Ventures, the firm he cofounded with his business partner, Rich Kleiman, in 2016.

His investments include the AI coding startup Hugging Face to the wellness company Thrive Global.

59. Zach Weinberg

Title: General partner, Operator Partners; cofounder and CEO, Curie.Bio

Notable investments: Whatnot, Nourish, Ro, Spring Health, QA Wolf

City: New York

Weinberg helps seed-stage founders discover drugs with his biotech-focused accelerator and investment firm, Curie.Bio. It’s backed by the industry heavyweights GV, Andreessen Horowitz, and Arch Venture Partners. It raised $340 million in January to back up to 20 more biotech companies this year.

He’s a successful two-time startup founder, having sold his adtech startup, Invite Media, to Google for $81 million in 2010. His second company, the oncology tech startup Flatiron Health, sold to Roche for $2 billion in 2018.

Weinberg also deploys capital through the early-stage venture firm he cofounded, Operator Partners, and maintains a personal portfolio as an angel investor.

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60. Steve Loughlin

Title: Partner, Accel

Notable investments: Monte Carlo Data, Airkit.ai, Poggio Labs, Centaur Labs, Productiv, Stairwell

City: Palo Alto, California

Loughlin was originally a founder, developing the sales technology startup RelateIQ, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2014 for $390 million. He joined Accel in 2016, where he helps lead the firm’s seed practice. One of Loughlin’s early bets, the data startup Monte Carlo Data raised $60 million in Series C funding in 2024 and saw 100% year-over-year revenue growth.

“In looking at new investments for a seed, it’s all about the founders,” Loughlin told BI. “Startups are never a straight line, so understanding why they are starting and learning about their history of execution is critical in partnering.”

61. Hadley Harris

Founding general partner, Eniac Ventures

Notable investments: Attentive, 1upHealth, Anchor, Hinge, Level AI, Attention

City: New York

Prior to cofounding New York-based Eniac Ventures in 2010, Harris cut his teeth at two VC-backed startups, including an AI voice assistant that would later become Siri.

He’s now using that experience to lead Eniac’s AI investing efforts, both at the application and tooling layer. Eniac leads early-stage rounds for software, AI, and IT companies.

“I feel incredibly fortunate to have spent over 15 years building and investing in AI-first companies, including building the first voice-based virtual assistant, which became Siri after being acquired,” Harris told BI. “This deep-rooted passion has given me valuable experience and insight, helping me partner with founders of AI-first companies today.”

62. Jason Warner

Cofounder and CEO, Poolside

Notable investments: Moderne, Render, The Browser Company, StarTree, Tinybird

City: San Francisco

Warner is the cofounder and CEO of buzzy AI startup Poolside, which just raised $500 million at a $3 billion valuation. Prior to founding Poolside, Warner was an investor at Redpoint Ventures, where he backed AI and infrastructure companies. Warner was also the CTO of GitHub, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2018 for over $7 billion.

63. Eric Wu

Cofounder and advisor, Opendoor

Notable investments: Ramp, Airtable, Mercury, Harvey, Faire

City: San Francisco

At the end of 2023, Wu stepped down as president of Opendoor, the property technology company he cofounded in 2014. The move opened the door for him to do more angel investing.

“While a common criterion, I place significant emphasis on the slope and market fit of the founding team,” Wu told BI.

He has a passion for real-estate tech firms, such as Kindred Concepts, which was founded by two former Opendoor employees, and the Brazilian homebuying marketplace Loft. Wu also oversees a syndicate alongside David King to write bigger checks.

64. Olaf Carlson-Wee

CEO, Polychain Capital

Notable investments: Polymarket, Anoma, Yellow Card, Merico, Vesper Energy

City: San Francisco

A self-proclaimed early lover of crypto who wrote his 2012 college thesis on bitcoin, Carlson-Wee became Coinbase’s first employee after he famously cold-emailed the company’s founders, he recalled in a 2016 interview with Y Combinator. That was the year he left Coinbase and launched Polychain Capital, an investment firm focused on backing crypto and blockchain-based technologies.

Since then, Carlson-Wee has served as the investment firm’s CEO, which has racked up nearly 300 investments, according to PitchBook. Those include checks to the crypto-based prediction market Polymarket and the African cryptocurrency exchange Yellow Card.

65. Dan Teran

Cofounder and managing partner, Gutter Capital

Notable investments: Forerunner, Bikky, Opus, Rowan

City: New York

Teran is a founder turned investor and started backing startups in 2021 after selling his company, the office management software Managed by Q, to WeWork in 2019 for $220 million. His portfolio has since grown to more than 100 startups, and several of his bets have blossomed into companies worth $1 billion.

“Whether it’s raising money, hiring executives, finding product-market fit, making an acquisition, or selling the company — most challenges our founders encounter I’ve done myself,” Teran said. “We built our strategy around being the founder’s first choice, and our highly concentrated investment strategy allows me to spend real time with our founders to recruit teams, close sales, navigate to product-market fit, and build companies of consequence.”

66. Neeraj Berry

Title: Founder and managing partner, Tet Ventures

Notable investments: Maven, Chef Robotics, Kingdom Supercultures, Wildwonder, Phytoform, Season Health

City: Oakland, California

A serial entrepreneur, Berry cofounded food delivery startup Sprig. He also founded 12Society, a subscription commerce business backed by a host of celebrities and investors like Mark Cuban. Berry founded Tet Ventures to make seed investments in food tech startups. One of Berry’s early investments, Chef Robotics, a startup that brings AI-powered robotics to food services, just raised $20.6 million in a Series A funding round.

“Money is flowing again, but we believe long-term success to be predicated on taking ambitious swings with fewer resources,” Berry told BI. “We’ve seen the rise and fall of the overcapitalized startup many times, and we’re betting on teams that are increasingly audacious, nimble, and resourceful.”

67. Peter Thiel

Title: Partner, Founders Fund

Notable investments: Airbnb, Anduril, Facebook, Flexport, Stripe

City: Los Angeles

Thiel keeps a low public profile despite being one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley and now in Washington, DC.

He is part of the early lore at some of Silicon Valley’s most iconic companies. He cofounded PayPal and Palantir and was an early investor in Facebook and LinkedIn. His more recent bets include the defense tech company Anduril, which is seeing extremely high demand from secondary investors, and Ramp, which doubled its valuation to $13 billion earlier this year.

Thiel has also launched several venture firms: Founders Fund, whose portfolio includes Faire and Rippling; Valar Ventures, an internationally focused firm that was an early backer of the accounting software company Xero; and Mithril Capital Management, which invested in the blockchain-focused fintech company Paxos.

This year, Thiel has seen his influence rise as an ally of the Trump administration. He is considered by many the “godfather of DOGE.”

68. Max Levchin

CEO, Affirm; general partner, SciFi VC

Notable investments: Yelp, Crunchyroll, Stripe, Gusto, Brex

City: San Francisco

Levchin cofounded the company that would become PayPal with Peter Thiel and cemented his lore in the tech world as a member of the now-famous “PayPal Mafia.” Since his PayPal days, he’s gone on to launch several companies, including the startup studio HVF. From HVF, Levchin spun out the fintech company Affirm, which he cofounded with Nathan Gettings, Jeffrey Kaditz, and Alex Rampell. He’s been the company’s CEO since 2014, heralding it through its IPO in early 2021.

Levchin is also an active investor and cofounded SciFi VC with his wife, Nellie Levchin, whom he credits with finding the firm’s investments and many of his angel investments. Levchin was also an early backer of companies including Yelp, Crunchyroll, and Stripe.

69. Guillermo Rauch

CEO, Vercel

Notable Investments: Perplexity, ElevenLabs, Resend, Spline, Braintrust

City: San Francisco

Rauch is the CEO of Vercel, a cloud infrastructure startup that last raised a $250 million Series E at a $3.25 billion valuation in 2024. Before Vercel, Rauch founded Cloudup, a startup acquired by the parent company of WordPress in 2013. He has angel invested in some of Silicon Valley’s buzziest startups, such as Perplexity and ElevenLabs.

Rauch’s own stance on rethinking products like Vercel to account for the rapid pace of AI advancements informs his investment thesis: “It’s very easy to rest on the laurels of what you’ve built,” he told BI. “It’s hard to try and disrupt yourself while revenue is growing, customers seem happy, and your peers are impressed, yet I think this is what the greatest companies are all about.”

70. Jack Altman

General partner, Alt Capital

Notable investments: Antares, Fillout, Legora, Owner, Rogo

City: San Francisco

A year and a half ago, Altman stepped back as the chief executive of Lattice, the human resources software company he founded and scaled to unicorn status, to return to his first love: the earliest stages of company-building. He locked down $150 million for his inaugural fund and launched an accelerator for business software startups, harnessing artificial intelligence.

Altman’s bets include Legora, the legal tech startup that’s shaking up the industry, and Rogo, the Thrive Capital-backed startup working to build Wall Street’s first truly autonomous analyst.

71. Nat Turner

General partner, Operator Partners; CEO, Collectors

Notable investments: Plaid, Suki, Oura, Zipline, David Energy

City: New York

Turner has been angel investing since 2010, the same year he sold his first startup, the adtech company Invite Media, to Google for $81 million. After two years at Google, he cofounded Flatiron Health, the cancer care startup acquired by Roche for $1.9 billion in 2018.

In 2020, he formalized his investment approach by launching the venture firm Operator Partners alongside three friends, including his Invite Media cofounder Zach Weinberg. He became the CEO of Collectors, an online collectibles marketplace and authentication platform, after leading an investor group in taking the company private in 2021. He joined GameStop’s board of directors in November, a month after Collectors notched a partnership with the gaming retailer.

72. Robert Leshner

General partner, Robot Ventures; CEO, Superstate

Notable investments: Nansen, Celestia, Axelar, LayerZero, Alluvial, Succinct

City: New York

Leshner is known as one of the forefathers of decentralized finance, having cofounded Compound Labs in 2017, which developed one of the first DeFi applications. He went on to cofound and is the CEO of Superstate, an asset management firm that’s building blockchain tokenized investment products.

Leshner is also a cofounder and general partner of Robot Ventures, a pre-seed and seed stage firm focused on crypto and fintech startups. Since its founding in 2019, Robot Ventures has backed more than 200 companies, and it raised $75 million for its fourth fund last year. Leshner shared his advice for startup founders now building: “Robots/AI are going to perform all jobs, from finance to media. Build accordingly.”

73. Jordan Nof

Managing director, Tusk Venture Partners

Notable investments: Ro, Alma, Dub, Sunday, Kodex, Lumion

City: New York

Nof started Tusk Venture Partners in 2015 to back early-stage tech companies in highly regulated markets. He’s bet on startups like the direct-to-consumer health startup Ro, which was last valued at $7 billion in 2022, and the mental health startup Alma, which raised $130 million in Series D funding in 2022.

Before launching Tusk Venture Partners, Nof was a director at Blackstone Innovations, the private equity giant Blackstone’s early-stage investing arm. In its 10-year history, Tusk Venture Partners has invested in companies such as the crypto exchange Coinbase, the insurtech company Lemonade, and the sports betting platform FanDuel.

74. Ron Pragides

Limited Partner, GTMfund

Notable Investments: Allstacks, Cacheflow, Cake Equity, Jet HR, Momentum.io, Seeds Investor

City: San Francisco

Pragides is one of more than 350 limited partners at GTMfund, an early-stage venture firm that invests in B2B SaaS companies, according to the company’s LinkedIn. He also angel invests and has cashed out on some hot investments, such as Cacheflow, a billing product startup that was acquired by HubSpot in 2024.

The most important qualities Pragides looks for in a startup before investing are founder-market fit, a B2B angle, prioritizing automation and efficiency, and “niches that I am personally interested in,” he told BI.

75. Terrence Rohan

Managing director, Otherwise Fund

Notable investments: Figma, Notion, Robinhood, Vanta, Hugging Face, Granola

City: San Francisco

Rohan began his venture capital career with seven years at Index Ventures, during which he built an angel fund for founders to make seed investments. He spun Otherwise Fund out of Index in 2017 with the same premise — to help founders invest in seed- to growth-stage startups. Rohan also invests from the fund, with a focus on seed-stage bets.

In the past year, nearly one-quarter of Rohan’s seed investments have seen valuation markups or raised Series A rounds, one of the highest ratios he’s seen in his 15 years of seed investing, he told BI. When choosing his investments, he said he focuses especially on the founders’ unique insights, as well as the “why now” question: What makes the timing right for that specific company to succeed?

“These essential variables don’t easily change and define company trajectory,” he said. “Everything else important — product, pricing, distribution, business model, competition — is more malleable and therefore secondary.”

76. Anne Dwane

Cofounder and partner, Village Global

Notable investments: Commontools, P-1 AI, AirGarage, Cherry, Pave, Grow Therapy

City: San Francisco

For a career investor like Dwane, AI has represented a generational shift, which is creating an exciting time to evaluate startups and founders for new investment opportunities.

“The last year has been like no other,” she told BI. “AI’s impact is just beginning to show up in legacy industries, where the gap between what’s possible and what exists remains wide.”

Dwane added that the industry is also experiencing a revolution when it comes to software development, which she said will allow more people to build companies.

Across Village Global’s three funds, Dwane’s deals have a cumulative holding value of more than $16 billion. Before Village Global, Dwane cofounded the veteran-focused news site Military.com and later served as the CEO of Zinch, a university-recruitment startup acquired by the edtech company Chegg in 2011.

77. Jim Andelman

Cofounder and managing director, Bonfire Ventures

Notable investments: Writer, Mntn, TaxJar, Boulevard, Wildfire Systems, Alvys

City: Los Angeles

Andelman kicked off his investing career 25 years ago, backing growth-stage software companies at Broadview Capital Partners. A few years later, he founded Rincon Venture Partners, which he calls one of the original “micro VC” firms — seed investing before seed investing as an industry exploded.

His latest venture firm, Bonfire Ventures, backs hot early-stage startups building business-to-business software. The firm raised its fourth and largest fund in February, a $245 million fund that pushed Bonfire’s total assets under management over $1 billion. Several of its portfolio companies have also had banner years, including the generative-AI startup Writer, which raised $200 million in Series C funding at a $1.9 billion valuation in November, and the adtech startup Mntn, which filed to go public in March.

78. Immad Akhund

Founder and CEO, Mercury

Notable Investments: Rappi, Airtable, Rippling, Etched, Decagon, Albedo Space

City: San Francisco

Akhund is the founder and CEO of the banking startup Mercury, which recently raised a $300 million Series C at a $3.5 billion valuation led by Sequoia. Before Mercury, Akhund cofounded Heyzap, a startup that made mobile game developer tools, which was acquired by Fyber for $45 million in 2016.

Akhund angel invests in “things that will seem inevitable 10 years from now and can be $10 billion companies,” he told BI. To him, these are Silicon Valley heavyweights such as Etched, which makes computing hardware, and Decagon, an AI-powered customer support software startup.

79. Emmett Shear

Title: Cofounder, Justin.tv

Notable investments: Torch, Cruise, ForeVR Games, Fathom, Substack

City: San Francisco

A serial entrepreneur, Shear is best known for cofounding the livestreaming startup Justin.tv with Kan. In 2011, Shear spun the gaming livestreaming business Twitch off from Justin.tv. In 2014, Amazon bought Twitch for $970 million, and Shear remained as its CEO. In 2023, he was the interim CEO of OpenAI for a short time after Sam Altman was ousted. Shear made early bets on companies like Substack and Cruise.

80. Ashu Garg

General partner, Foundation Capital

Notable investments: Databricks, Anyscale, Cohesity, Arize, Turing, Eightfold

City: Palo Alto, California

For Garg, whose firm, Foundation Capital, was founded more than 30 years ago and placed its first AI bet more than a decade ago, there are three important things to look for when it comes to evaluating an early-stage, pre-revenue startup: the founder, the market, and technical insight.

“I look for evidence of ‘exceptional’ — exceptional intellect, exceptional grit, and exceptionally high willingness to prioritize the startup over almost everything else in their life,” he told BI. “What’s the unique insight that makes this startup different from the 100-plus other players going after the same market?”

Over the years, keeping these questions in mind has served Garg well as he’s made bets in startups like Databricks, which has mulled an IPO, Cohesity, and Turing.

Prior to joining Foundation Capital in 2008, Garg worked at McKinsey and Microsoft.

81. Andrew Miklas

Title: Founder, Functional Capital; cofounder, PagerDuty

Notable investments: Gem, Retool, Clerk, Courier

City: San Francisco

Miklas cofounded the digital operations management company PagerDuty with Alex Solomon and Baskar Puvanathasan in 2009. He served as the company’s chief technology officer until 2016 and then transitioned to venture capital, becoming a venture partner at S28 Capital. He also founded the early-stage firm Functional Capital, which focuses on B2B startups. Miklas has been a visiting group partner at Y Combinator since last year. PagerDuty was part of the accelerator’s summer cohort in 2010 and became its second company to go public after a 2019 IPO.

82. Lee Fixel

Title: Founder, Addition

Notable investments: Hugging Face, Lyra Health, Satispay

City: New York

Fixel spent more than a decade at Tiger Global Management and played a pivotal role in investing in companies such as Flipkart, Spotify, and Peloton. In 2019, he departed to launch his own venture capital firm, Addition, which focuses on early- and growth-stage startups.

During the past six years, Fixel and Addition have built an investment portfolio that includes companies like Hugging Face, Lyra Health, Satispay, Chainalysis, and Snyk.

83. Ramtin Naimi

Founder and general partner, Abstract

Notable investments: Solana, Rippling, WorkOS, Hebbia, Passes, Replit

City: San Francisco

Naimi kick-started his investment career at the age of 15, trading options. He then founded a hedge fund at just 18. Naimi later founded Abstract in 2016, where he focuses on leading seed-stage deals across all sectors. He says the firm has $1.6 billion in assets under management, and recent investments include the AI agent developer tool Anon, the autonomous-robot maker Watney Robotics, and the AI defense tech startup Kela. As for what Naimi looks for in a founder, he said, “I like high-momentum founders that operate with a relentless sense of urgency and demonstrate novel thinking.”

84. Ludwig Pierre Schulze

Title: Managing partner, Alumni Ventures

Notable Investments: Clarium Health, Nixtla, CompScience, ForceMetrics, Synthesis School

City: New York

Pierre Schulze is a managing partner at Alumni Ventures, where he writes checks ranging from $50,000 to $10 million to pre-seed to Series B companies. Through Alumni Ventures, Pierre Schulze manages Waterman Ventures, Brown University’s VC community, and 116 Street Ventures, Columbia University’s VC community.

“One of our companies went from single to triple-digit millions of revenue in a year,” Pierre Schulze said when asked about his biggest accomplishments from 2024.

85. Milad Alucozai

Title: Cofounder and general partner, Pamir Ventures

Notable investments: Fathom, Character Biosciences, Axonis Therapeutics, Talus Bio, Seqera Labs

City: San Francisco

Alucozai started in venture capital at BoxOne Ventures, where he spent nearly six years leading 70 of the firm’s early-stage investments as its head of life sciences and deep tech. While at BoxOne, he helped cofound Revalia Bio, a startup spun out of Yale that’s working to enable drug discovery and development through the study of revived human organs. Alucozai led Revalia Bio’s pre-seed round and invested in its 2024 seed round.

With a background in neuroscience, Alucozai said his singular focus as an early-stage investor is identifying brilliant technical founders. He said he looks for technical leaders from humble backgrounds setting out to build long-lasting products.

Alucozai left BoxOne this past summer. This year, he said he’s focused on building and launching an unannounced early-stage venture fund with two of his friends dubbed Pamir Ventures.

86. Meltem Demirors

General partner, Crucible Capital

Notable investments: Double Zero, CentralAxis, Ostium

City: New York

Demirors has had a busy year launching her new firm, Crucible Capital, which invests in energy, compute, and crypto startups. Crucible ended 2024 with $36 million in committed capital from a $50 million target fund and is now oversubscribed, Demirors told BI. The firm also recently made its third investing hire.

For Demirors, Crucible Capital is the natural extension of her long career as an investor outside the traditional venture capital space. Rather than spinning out of a VC fund, she built investment firms and asset managers in crypto while she was angel investing. Prior to launching Crucible, Demirors was the chief strategy officer at the digital-asset investment company CoinShares.

At Crucible, her LPs are mostly builders, operators, and investors, rather than institutional investors or funds of funds.

“I feel like Crucible is a bit of an anomaly and it can be challenging considering how clubby venture can be sometimes,” she said.

87. Mathilde Collin

Title: Cofounder and executive chairperson, Front

Notable Investments: Retool, Mercury, Vanta, Copilot, Meter, Browser Use

City: San Francisco

Colllin cofounded Front, a customer service platform startup, in 2013 after working as a project manager at another startup. She served as Front’s CEO until October and is now its executive chairperson. Collin also angel invests in a variety of companies, which include the fintech banking startup Mercury and the tool-building platform Retool.

In founders, Collin looks for “a delicate balance between humility, self awareness and self confidence,” she told BI. “Enough self confidence to inspire people to be on the journey with them, enough humility to get people to help them, enough self awareness to work on themselves.”

88. Christopher Golda

Founder and managing partner, Rogue Capital

Notable investments: Apex Space, Benchling, Coinbase, Stoke Space, Supabase

City: San Francisco

Golda began his entrepreneurial career as the founder of BackType, an analytics company that raised funding from Y Combinator and firms such as True Ventures. Twitter acquired BackType in 2011, and Golda stayed at the social media company for three years, leading product efforts at its advertising center. He left to launch Rogue Capital in 2014 to back seed and Series A startups.

Like many of the investors on this list, Golda said he focuses on the founder when choosing bets — but he’s specifically looking for “a high tolerance for chaos and uncertainty,” a critical skill he says can be especially difficult to develop later in life. “Without that, even the most resourceful founders will struggle to overcome the day-to-day challenges of a startup,” he said.

89. Warren Weiss

Title: Managing partner, WestWave Capital; general partner, Foundation Capital

Notable investments: Theta Lake, Solo.io, Binarly, Secuvy, Cigent, Savant Labs

City: Redwood City, California

Weiss, a four-time CEO, founded WestWave in 2017 to invest in emerging software companies. In the past year, he has backed a number of software companies, including Secuvy, Elate, Savant, and Discern Security. He also serves on the boards of Trufa, Cyphort, Moxie, SilkRoad Technology, Silver Spring Networks, and Visier.

“This is the most distributive and exciting time to be in the early-stage venture capital market that I have ever seen,” Weiss told BI. “AI will drive the reinvention of every single category that WestWave Capital invests in. This will create many new multibillio companies.”

90. Ann DeWitt

General partner, Engine Ventures

Notable investments: Cellino, Bexorg, Matrisome Bio, Terragia, Anthology, Kano Therapeutics, Source Bio

City: Boston

DeWitt has spent her career helping companies build new transformative biotechnologies. She began in VC at the Massachusetts life sciences firm Flagship Pioneering, then moved to Sanofi, where she guided the pharma giant’s investments.

She joined The Engine, an MIT spinout, in 2018, two years after its launch. First as The Engine’s chief operating officer, then as a general partner, she supported the startup incubator and accelerator’s work with “tough tech” companies, offering an array of resources from lab space to capital for startups building in areas like climate and human health.

In 2023, DeWitt stayed on the investing side of the business when The Engine split its startup support operations from its venture arm. She highlighted Engine Ventures’ investment in Cellino, which announced in February plans to open a stem cell manufacturing facility on-site at Massachusetts General Hospital in partnership with the top health system Mass General Brigham’s Gene and Cell Therapy Institute.

91. Michael Sutton

Title: Cofounder and general partner, Runtime Ventures

Notable Investments: StepSecurity, SplxAI, System Two, Todyl, GreyNoise, Orca Security

City: Arlington, Virginia

Sutton worked in cybersecurity for more than two decades before investing in the space as a venture capitalist. He started his career at EY and then worked at the internet infrastructure and security company iDefense, which VeriSign bought in 2005. Sutton then served as the chief information security officer at Zscaler, which helped establish the security-as-a-service industry.

Before cofounding the cyber-focused firm Runtime Ventures with David Endler, a cybersecurity veteran, Sutton worked in VC at Blu Venture Investors, YL Ventures, and StoneMill Ventures. Runtime’s first $32 million fund closed in January 2025. “Starting a VC fund from scratch, especially as a former operator, took a tremendous amount of hard work, unwavering determination and exhausting our network, but it was all worth it,” Sutton told BI.

“Runtime Ventures is the culmination of my experience and passion building and funding cybersecurity startups. It’s what I know and love,” he said, adding: “We are blessed to be able to do this every day.”

92. Justin Kan

Title: Cofounder, Goat Capital

Notable investments: Torch, Sendbird, Paystack, ForeVR Games, Cruise

City: San Francisco

Kan is best known as a cofounder of livestreaming startup Justin.tv and Twitch, the internet live video streaming platform that was sold to Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. He’s also invested in some of the well-known startups in tech, including Reddit, Cruise, and Rippling. Kan, who makes seed investments through his firm Goat Capital, recently founded Stash, a direct-to-consumer platform for games.

93. Nicolas Dessaigne

Title: General partner, Y Combinator

Notable Investments: Encord, Flower AI, Continue.dev, Wordware, Unsloth

City: San Francisco

Dessaigne knows a thing or two about Y Combinator — not only because he’s currently a general partner at the famed accelerator, but also because he was in a Y Combinator cohort as a cofounder of Algolia. The search API startup last raised funding in 2021, which valued it at more than $2 billion. Now on the other side of the table, Dessaigne has invested in a slew of Y Combinator-backed companies, such as the multimodal data labeling AI startup Encord, which raised a $30 million Series B led by Next47 in August 2024.

“I’m amazed by how AI is giving superpowers to new founders, from codegen tools that 10x development speed to new models that unlock massive value,” Dessaigne told BI. “Incumbents simply can’t keep up with their pace. There’s never been a better time to start a company.”

94. Abhishek Sharma

Managing director, Nexus Venture Partners

Notable investments: Apollo.io, Fingerprint, Nx, Daloopa, TileDB,

City: Menlo Park, California

An engineer by training who studied at one of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology, Sharma cofounded the startup HelloIntern.com, worked as an associate at the consulting firm Booz & Company, and did a stint at eBay before jumping into venture capital. Since 2015, he’s been with the VC firm Nexus Venture Partners, which focuses on enterprise SaaS startups in the US and digital companies in India. Sharma has led some of the firm’s deals with companies such as Clover Health, which went public in 2021.

Sharma said that last year he was an early investor in the fast-growing AI agent development startup StackBlitz, known for its product Bolt.new. He’s also excited about his recent investments in the AI workflow automation startup Gumloop and the AI call center startup Leaping AI.

Sharma said he “loves partnering with first-time technical founders” and values those who have “product obsession, single-minded focus, clarity of thinking, and humility.”

95. Wally Wang

Title: Founding managing partner, Scale Asia Ventures

Notable Investments: Weaviate, Argilla, Array, CAST AI, Fiddler AI, AppZen

City: Palo Alto, California

Wang started in tech as a product manager for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. After founding two startups and working at enterprise software companies, he led venture investments for the Asian conglomerate Fosun International and a family office.

While Wang is a solo GP at Scale Asia Ventures, the small but mighty team has already had three acquisitions in the past year. When investing in AI infrastructure, Wang scouts founders “who can adeptly adapt successful strategies from the previous cloud era to the emerging generative AI landscape,” he said.

96. Andrew Vigneault

Founder and general partner, Flexcap Ventures

Notable investments: Helicone, Kindo, DraftAid, Crossmint, Nium

City: New York

Vigneault has made his way onto the cap tables of some of the biggest startups through his early-stage fund, FlexCap Ventures. He wrote an early check to the NFT trading marketplace OpenSea and a seed check to the cybersecurity startup Material Security, which hit a $1.1 billion valuation in 2022.

Vigneault said he made 16 new seed investments in 2024, including a startup developing agentic AI to automate silicon engineering and others building AI models to enable early detection of chronic illnesses. Of the 50 seed investments he made from 2022 to 2024, 60% have been marked up through raising follow-on capital, he said.

When evaluating new opportunities, Vigneault said, he focuses on “partnering with founders who exhibit a profound and authentic comprehension of their industry and prospect customers.”

97. Zachary Bratun-Glennon

Cofounder and general partner, Gradient Ventures

Notable Investments: Lambda, Rad AI, ELSA, Venn, Syrup, Clarify

City: San Francisco

Since cofounding Gradient, Google’s venture fund focused on AI, in 2017, Bratun-Glennon has invested in more than 35 companies, and he’s on more than 25 boards. Before Gradient, Bratun-Glennon helmed acquisitions and strategic investments for Google Cloud. He also worked as a technology banker at Deutsche Bank and began his career as an analyst at the energy-focused firm DC Energy.

At Gradient, Bratun-Glennon invests in pre-seed, seed, and Series A startups building in areas such as applied AI technologies, fintech, and B2B software. This includes Lambda, a startup most recently valued at more than $2 billion that develops a cloud computing platform for AI training and inference, which Bratun-Glennon backed in its seed round in 2017.

“We’ve been focused on backing the best founders in applied AI at the earliest stages for a decade, and we think the space is just getting started,” Bratun-Glennon told BI. “Today’s ‘wrappers’ are tomorrow’s software platforms, built by layering unique user value, proprietary data and deep workflow integration.”

98. Nitesh Banta

Cofounder and CEO, B12

Notable investments: Codeium, Cognition Labs, Grammarly, ZeroEyes, Varda, Chai Discovery

City: New York

Banta started the professional services firm B12 in 2015, the same year he began angel investing through a fund called Stellar Capital. Before B12, he cofounded the car-sharing app Getaround and the student-focused VC firm Rough Draft Ventures, and spent five years as an investor at General Catalyst backing early-stage tech companies.

He said the rise of AI has made the current moment the most exciting time he’s experienced in more than two decades of early-stage investing, highlighting AI’s ability to enable founders to do more with less.

“With less capital, founders can leverage AI to build better products and scale faster than ever,” he said.

99. Ash Egan

Cofounder, Archetype Ventures

Notable investments: Privy, Farcaster, Reservoir, Parcl, Chainalysis, Bison Trails

City: New York

Egan has been leading investments in seed-stage crypto companies and protocols since 2015, writing early checks to startups including Chainalysis, Mina, Near, and Balancer. He also previously led investments for the VC firm Accomplice in Dapper Labs/Flow and Bison Trails (which was acquired by Coinbase), among others. One of Egan’s early investments, Privy, hit 50 million wallets this year and raised a new round of funding led by Ribbit Capital.

Egan said he’s interested in investing in startups at the “intersection of crypto and AI; programmable social networks and applications that will be built atop; and infrastructure and middleware that will make blockchains as fast and as cheap as an API call.”

100. Morgan Flager

Managing partner, Silverton Partners

Notable investments: AlertMedia, Ping Identity, Self Financial, The Zebra, The Helper Bees, Repairify

City: Austin

Flager has spent the past 18 years at Silverton Partners, where he has been a managing partner since 2009. At Silverton, Flager has sponsored 24 investments, as well as overseeing 11 acquisitions and two IPOs. Before that, he briefly worked at FTV Capital in San Francisco as an associate. He got his start as an operator at the then startups Ingrian Networks and Kintana. Flager also cofounded the e-commerce infrastructure startup Woosh in 1998.

Flager said that in his 25 years in venture capital and startups, there had never been a more exciting time to be an early-stage tech investor. “We’re witnessing an unprecedented wave of innovation, where advances in artificial intelligence are rapidly transforming every industry, from healthcare and finance to education and entertainment,” he told BI. “The pace of progress is accelerating, and startups natively leveraging AI are not only solving complex problems faster and more effectively but they are also creating entirely new markets.”

Interactive development by Annie Fu and Randy Yeip.