A familiar set of active investors led startup dealmaking in the third quarter, backing and leading the most rounds as well as spending heavily to do so.
Y Combinator, the global leader at seed and an active follow-on investor, was a particular standout in Q3 for deal count. As for the highest-spending investors, backers in Anthropic’s $13 billion Series F led the pack.
Overall, meanwhile, serial backers of AI megarounds topped our most-active investor ranks. These included well-known names like Insight Partners, General Catalyst, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz and Iconiq Capital.
For more detail, below we break out the most-active investor ranks across multiple categories, looking at busiest lead dealmakers, highest spenders, and top venture and seed backers.
Most-active lead investors
Insight Partners was the most-active global lead investor in Q3, serving as lead or co-lead investor in 19 reported deals, per Crunchbase data. The largest rounds included a $1 billion financing for Databricks and a $260 million Series E for legal tech unicorn Filevine.
Accel was next, with 14 deals, followed by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India and Southeast Asia) and General Catalyst.
Spendiest investors
We can also get a sense of who put the most capital to work in Q3 by looking at lead investors in the most expensive collection of rounds.
It’s not an exact science, given that investors seldom disclose their share of a particular financing. However, it does give us an idea.
At the top of the list are co-lead investors in the latest Anthropic round: Fidelity, Iconiq Capital, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Among other investors who led multiple rounds last quarter, the most active were Andreessen Horowitz and Insight Partners. And as shown below, there were 19 investors who led or co-led one or more rounds valued at $1 billion and up.
Busiest post-seed investors
The rankings look quite a bit different when we stop focusing on lead investors and instead look simply at who backed the most post-seed rounds.
By this measure, the far-and-away leader is Y Combinator, which rarely takes a lead role but does participate as a return investor in rounds for startups that came through its accelerator program.
General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz tied for second place, with 29 reported deals each, followed by Insight Partners and Accel, with 25 and 24 rounds, respectively.
Most-active seed investors
For this past quarter, Y Combinator also claimed its usual spot as the most-active seed-stage investor. Per Crunchbase data, the famed accelerator backed at least 218 reported seed financings, up from Q2 but down a bit year over year.
Next in the ranks was TechStars, followed by Antler. And below, we take a lengthier look at the most-active global seed investors.
Chugging along
The big picture from Q3’s active investor tallies is that established leaders among startup investors are still very much in the game. While there’s been some shuffling in the ranks in recent quarters, the top active investor slots on our lists still contain mostly the same names.
Not coincidentally, many are also some of the biggest AI investors and already have some of the highest-profile startups in their portfolios. Given that so many of these companies continue to see big markups and red-hot investor demand, the immediate forecast is that many more big checks from these investors are likely to pile up before years end.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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