The most active global startup investors largely got busier in the second quarter of 2025, backing and leading more rounds and putting larger sums of capital into deals.
Overall, nine of the 10 most active venture investors did more deals in Q2 than in Q1, per Crunchbase data. Ditto for 80% of the top 10 lead investors by deal count, as well as the vast majority of the spendiest investors in Q2.
However, while many big-name firms upped their investment activity, we did see one Q1 record-setter step back. SoftBank, which backed OpenAI’s unprecedented $40 billion financing in late March, did not place in any of our most-active or highest-spending investor rankings for Q2.
Below, we drill into the active investor rankings in more detail, looking at top venture investors, biggest spenders and busiest seed backers.
Lead venture investors
We’ll start with lead investors, as this provides a snapshot of busy dealmakers who also put a lot of capital to work in each round.
For Q2, Accel and General Catalyst stood out as the most active by this metric, with 20 and 16 lead rounds, respectively.
Many of those deals were jumbo-sized investments as well. Accel, for example, led five rounds of $100 million more, including a $500 million financing for generative AI unicorn Perplexity and a $260 million Series C for spacetech startup True Anomaly.
General Catalyst also kept busy, leading eight deals of $100 million and up. Its biggest investment was a $1 billion financing for AI writing and productivity assistant Grammarly.
The rest of the top five — Insight Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners — weren’t too far behind. Below, we ranked them in a list of the 21 most-active lead investors for the quarter.
Spendiest investors
While Accel and General Catalyst may have led the most deals, they didn’t spend the most money in Q2.
That title goes to Meta for a single deal: Its $14.3 billion investment for Scale AI as part of a strategic and financial deal that also had founder Alexandr Wang join the social media giant.
After Meta, the next-heaviest spenders were Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz. For Founders, the ranking was mostly due to the $2.5 billion round it led for defense tech unicorn Anduril. For Andreessen, the biggest round was the $2 billion seed financing it led for Thinking Machines Lab.
After them came Greenoaks, which led Safe Superintelligence’s $2 billion round in April.
Busiest venture dealmakers
While some venture investors concentrate their bets on a few rounds, others spread their money across a high number of deals.
In this latter group, a perennial standout is Y Combinator. Though best known as a seed accelerator, it also participates in later rounds for companies it incubated, usually as a non-lead investor.
That translates into a lot of deals. For Q2, Y Combinator participated in 45 post-seed financings, the most of any investor. The lineup included large rounds for high-profile companies including HR platform Rippling and AI robotics startup Gecko Robotics.
After Y Combinator, the second-most-active by deal count was General Catalyst, which participated in 38 deals as a lead or non-lead investor in Q2. In third place was Accel, with 31 deals, followed by Khosla Ventures, with 30.
Below, we ranked the 22 most-active post-seed investors of the quarter by deal count.
Seed investors
Seed-stage investors also kept busy in Q2, with familiar names leading the way.
Y Combinator landed the top slot, with 50 reported seed investments. Next was Antler, with 33 seed deals.
For a broader perspective, below we ranked the 18 most-active global seed dealmakers, based on reported rounds.
It should be noted that seed investment reporting differs from other stages and this can affect deal counts. For one, accelerators commonly report investments in batches, causing high deal-count fluctuation from quarter to quarter. Additionally, seed-stage companies and backers are often stealthy and are known to delay reporting new financings.
Overall: Busy times, big checks
As we review our rankings of the most-active and highest-spending investors for the quarter, the broad takeaway looks pretty clear. Overall, these are bullish times for startup backers, evidenced by high deal counts as well as big-ticket individual rounds.
Looking ahead, we’ll be curious to see if a pickup in IPO activity translates into more deals and large pre-IPO rounds from growth investors. Given that the active investor list is dominated by U.S.-focused firms, it’ll also be interesting to see more international representation in the ranks.
Related reading:
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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