What Funding Slump? Active Venture Investors Picked Up The Pace In Q3

Global startup funding may have slowed in the third quarter, but that slowdown apparently didn’t apply to the most active venture investors, most of whom actually upped their dealmaking pace.

This is particularly true for the three most-active post-seed investors — Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst — which all significantly increased dealmaking in Q3. Overall, out of the 14 most-active investors at this stage, charted below, only two did fewer deals year over year, Crunchbase data shows.

Seeing Y Combinator atop the ranks of most-active post-seed investors is noteworthy, as the famed accelerator is best known for seed rounds. However, the organization has over the years increased efforts and fundraising to support its accelerator cohorts as they scale.

Many of the post-seed rounds Y Combinator backed this past quarter were for AI-focused companies, which isn’t surprising given the high number of AI startups in recent accelerator cohorts. AI-related companies it backed post-seed this past quarter include data development platform Encord, legaltech startup Leya, and AI search engine Exa.

Meanwhile, Andreessen Horowitz, the second-most-active venture investor, also put large sums last quarter into startups including Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sustkever, and Hebbia, an AI analytics platform.

Lead investors

Another way to rank active venture investors is to look at who led or co-led the largest number of rounds. This metric is intended to shed light on which busy startup backers also tended to provide a large portion of capital in their chosen rounds.

To illustrate, below we list nine investors who led or co-led the highest number of post-seed rounds.

The past quarter’s ranking isn’t too different from Q2. Both times, the same four firms — Andreessen, General Catalyst, Accel and Khosla Ventures — were also in the top four slots. However, this time around, it was Andreessen and General Catalyst tied for the top slot.

Spendiest lead investors

To get a sense of who put the most capital to work, we also ranked active investors who led or co-led rounds with the highest collective value. This isn’t an exact science, given that lead investors in syndicates rarely disclose how much they contributed to a particular round. However, it does provide a sense of who’s investing large sums.

For Q3, we ranked 10 investors that led or co-led rounds collectively valued at $500 million or more, as charted below.

Here, General Catalyst came out on top after leading and co-leading at least eight rounds valued at $100 million or more in Q3, per Crunchbase data. The largest include financings for German AI defense company Helsing ($492 million Series C), Indian grocery delivery platform Zepto ($340 million Series G) and AI coding platform Codeium ($150 million Series C).

Founders Fund ranked second, largely due to a single deal: a lead investment in defense tech unicorn Anduril Industries’ $1.5 billion August Series F.

Most-active seed investors

At seed stage, quarterly deal count for active investors can vary widely each quarter. That’s partly because it’s common to announce batches of seed investments all together rather than deal by deal. Additionally, seed deals may get added to the database a few weeks or months after they close.

Given this state of affairs, it’s not necessarily a sign of trouble to see that the three most-active seed investors all did far fewer deals in the third quarter than they did a year ago.

Additionally, while reported deal counts contracted, rankings didn’t change much. Techstars, Y Combinator and Antler are usually the most-active seed investors in a given quarter.

To provide a broader picture of who’s active at seed stage, below we list 12 investors who participated in the highest number of reported financings.

Big picture: high representation among U.S. investors

While the ranks of active investors didn’t show a dramatic change since the prior quarter, it is relevant to note one trend that has continued to play out. That is the preponderance of U.S.-headquartered investors among those backing the greatest number of deals and leading the largest rounds.

Among our most-active lead venture investors, for instance, all are U.S.-based. On the list of most active post-seed investors by round count, all but one are headquartered in the U.S.

As U.S. investors top the most-active listings, North American venture investment is also holding up a bit better than the global average. Largely, this is due to giant rounds for AI-focused companies.

Looking ahead, it’ll be interesting to see if regions that have posted weaker funding tallies in recent quarters see a rebound. If so, that will likely bring more investors headquartered in those regions into our most-active rankings.