If you’re looking for new up-and-comers in venture capital, don’t read our rankings of the most active investors in 2025.
That’s because this past year, the list almost exclusively featured longstanding, familiar names. These are firms that routinely topped prior rankings, and for the most part they only got busier in 2025.
This is certainly true for our most active post-seed investors last year – Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, General Catalyst and Sequoia Capital. Each of them participated in more than 100 reported rounds last year and backed more deals than in 2024.
Overall, there were at least 15 investors who participated in 50 or more post-seed rounds of over $3 million, per Crunchbase data, plus another three in the high 40s. We rank them below:
Q4 most active venture and lead venture investors
We also analyzed active investor rankings for the fourth quarter of 2025, which produced results that aren’t dramatically different by some measures.
The most similar was the ranking of post-seed investors, which featured the same five names in the top slots as the full-year list:
The same familiar names showed up in our Q4 ranking of most active lead or co-lead investors, albeit in reshuffled spots. The standout exception was Y Combinator, which typically takes a non-lead role in follow-on rounds for companies that partook in its accelerator program.
Spendiest Q4 investors
The top names start to look quite a bit different when we focus more on round size.
For the ranking below, we look at investors who led or co-led rounds totalling $1 billion or more in Q4. This isn’t an exact proxy for who spent the most, since rounds with multiple investors don’t break out each backer’s share. However, it does give a general sense of who put serious sums of capital to work:
Fidelity, Insight Partners, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management came out on top, as they were co-lead investors in Databricks’ $4 billion December financing.
Busiest seed investors
Among seed investors, meanwhile, Y Combinator hung on to its customary No. 1 position in Q4. After that came Antler and 500 Global.
Below, we rank the 13 most active seed investors by reported deal counts:
Big picture: Well-known VCs led
Overall, looking at most active investor rankings for 2025 and for Q4, a few characteristics stand out.
One is that the rankings are largely dominated by U.S.-based investors. This is particularly pronounced at post-seed, with a bit more geographic diversity at seed stage.
Also, it should be noted that there is broad variance in the geographic investment preferences of U.S.-headquartered firms. Some, like Andreessen Horowitz, mostly invest domestically, while others, like Accel, are more dispersed across multiple continents.
The other obvious thing to note is that big name investors appear to be maintaining their lead roles in the startup funding ecosystem. They’re certainly not fading away. To the contrary, the most active appear to be scaling up further.
Related reading:
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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