Most Active Investor Rankings Got Reshuffled In Q2 As VCs Got Busier

The Crunchbase rankings of active startup investors looked quite different in the second quarter of 2024 compared to a year ago.

First, nearly all of the most active venture investors were busier in Q2 of this year. Second, several names at or near the top of the list of busiest and highest-spending investors — including Khosla Ventures, Coatue, and Accel — were much lower down a year ago.

To illustrate how active investors compare, we used Crunchbase data to rank them across multiple categories, including venture deal count, lead investment spending and lead round counts.

Most active post-seed investors

We’ll start with most post-seed investors, tallying who participated in the largest number of venture and growth rounds. Below, we list the top seven, comparing Q2 to year-ago levels:

For Khosla Ventures, Q2 marks its first time at the top of the ranking since we began publishing it a few years ago. The Silicon Valley-based firm, active in software, biotech and cleantech, participated in 26 deals last quarter.

Second- and third-place rankings went to Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, both longstanding venture investment powerhouses that upped their activity levels significantly from a year ago.

Meanwhile Andreessen Horowitz, which was the most active in this category in Q1, actually slowed a bit, coming in at fourth place.

Spendiest investors

Next we’ll look at which investors appear to have put the most money to work in lead rounds in Q2.

This isn’t an exact science, as rounds with multiple backers almost never break down how much each investor contributed. However, we can venture an educated guess by looking at total dollars that went into lead rounds backed by particular investors, since lead backers tend to contribute a good-sized portion.

Using this approach, here are the top ten “spendiest” lead investors for Q2 2024:

In this ranking, Andreessen re-emerges in the top slot, thanks to its role as lead investor in large Q2 rounds for companies like Wiz, Formation Bio, Hebbia and Talkiatry.

Next is Coatue, mostly due to its role as lead investor in CoreWeave’s $1.1 billion Series C. In third place is Accel, which led Scale AI’s $1 billion Series F.

Most active lead investors

We also looked at which investors led or co-led the largest number of venture rounds.

By this metric, Khosla Ventures was in the lead, followed by Accel and Andreessen. Below, we list the top eight using this measure:

Notably, all of our active lead investors completed significantly more deals this past quarter than they did a year ago.

AI in the driver’s seat

Why have active investors gotten busier in recent months? Well, clearly artificial intelligence is a factor, as AI gobbled up a record share of global funding in Q2. Most of the top active VCs did multiple deals in the space during the quarter, including all of the top-ranked lead investors by round count.

Overall investment has also risen, with early stage dealmaking in particular up sharply from year-ago levels. While that hasn’t translated into more reported rounds overall, it does appear that the most active investors are stepping up the pace of dealmaking.

Illustration: Dom Guzman