Generally speaking, U.S. startup investment isn’t a seasonal activity. Sure, funding announcements tend to slow around major holidays. But overall, it’s not a sector known for taking summer vacations.
Given that pattern, it’s probably remiss to dismiss August’s slowdown in dealmaking as a summer thing. However, it’s also not clear we’re heading for a downturn, as September is off to a brisk start with Anthropic’s $13 billion round. So maybe it’s just an August 2025 thing.
Even as investment slowed, a number of active investors were quite busy in August, including familiar names like General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. Others took a step back.
For a bigger picture view of how investors spent the month, we look at how the most active names ranked across several metrics. These include busiest venture dealmakers, highest-spending investors and top seed backers.
Most-active venture investors
Among venture dealmakers, a few names stood out. Per Crunchbase data, Y Combinator, General Catalyst and Sequoia backed the largest number of rounds of $5 million or more in August.
Overall, there were 11 investors that backed four or more such rounds during the month, which we chart below.
Most-active and highest-spending lead investors
We also looked at the most-active lead investors in August. In this ranking, focused on post-seed round counts, the standouts were General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz and Insight Partners.
For a bigger-picture view, we list the 12 most-active U.S. lead investors below.
We also took a look at which investors put the most money into deals. Although it’s not an exact measure, we can get a sense of this by ranking investors who took a lead role in deals with the highest total value.
By this metric, Founders Fund led the ranks, mostly due to the $500 million round it led for AI startup Cognition. Next was SK, which led a $463 million round for battery tech developer Group14 Technologies, and Andreessen Horowitz, which led or co-led multiple large rounds, including a $250 million Series E for vertical AI provider EliseAI.
Seed investors
Among seed investors, Y Combinator, as usual, led the pack, although its deal pace slowed considerably from the prior month. Next on the list were Alumni Ventures and Techstars.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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