Shenchao Summary: A Stanford Graduate School of Business professor used 230,000 investment records to reconstruct venture capital rankings, revealing that 90% of industry profits are earned by just 5% of VCs. For founders, choosing the wrong investor could mean a tenfold difference in returns—this article provides actionable criteria for selection.
This is a guest article by Ilya Strebulaev, who teaches venture capital and private equity at Stanford Graduate School of Business and leads the Stanford Venture Capital Initiative. He publishes venture capital research, investor rankings, and funding guides for founders in his newsletter.
Every founder raising funds from venture capitalists has heard the same names: Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark. But there’s one number that should matter more to your fundraising strategy than these names. Based on my estimates, roughly 5% of venture capitalists generate about 90% of the industry’s profits. When choosing who to take money from, the most important question is: Is your investor in that 5%? Name recognition doesn’t reliably indicate this.
Chart: The top 5% of venture capitalists generate about 90% of the industry’s profits—whether your investor is among them matters more than their brand name.
So far, there has been no transparent, fully data-driven approach to answering this question. The Forbes Midas List, which the industry relies on, is largely a black box. When we attempted to reverse-engineer it based on its published methodology, even our best-fitting replication failed to include 49 of its own top 100 investors on the actual list. Among investors appearing on both our ranking and the Midas List, the correlation is only about 0.27.
Therefore, I partnered with Blake Jackson to develop an alternative: the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson Venture Capital Rankings, based on over 230,000 investments made by nearly 13,000 venture capitalists across more than 5,000 companies over a 30-year period. Each score is traceable to a specific investment in a specific company on a specific date. We impose no editorial judgment, make no manual adjustments, and do not rely on company-submitted data.
This article includes the complete top 100 ranking, the methodology behind it, and—since ranking alone won’t make you a good investor—what you should do after seeing your rank.
What exactly does this score measure?
Six factors drive this score. It’s worth reading carefully, as they collectively reward behaviors that founders want to see in investors.
Dilution. A 10% stake in the first round is no longer 10% by the time of exit. Both companies might sell for $1 billion, but if one has completed four funding rounds during the process, its early investors are diluted in each round. We track how each investment’s equity stake changes through subsequent rounds.
Net profit. Turning $10 million into $2 billion is a different achievement than turning $1 billion into the same $2 billion. Deduct the cost of each investment, reward capital efficiency, and penalize spending large sums merely to generate a few headline wins. In our data, about three-quarters of investments had negative net returns.
Value-added. Investors who lead the round and take a board seat contribute more than those who simply write checks, and we award additional points for these roles.
The allocation of credit between companies and individuals. Investors move between companies, so when a partner completes their best deal at one company and then moves to another, both companies should receive some credit. We split it: one-quarter goes to the company where the investment occurred, and three-quarters goes to the company where the partner is currently based. This reflects academic evidence that most of the variation in returns stems from individuals rather than institutions.
2026 Results: Top Companies
Sequoia ranks first with 10,158 points. Andreessen Horowitz ranks second with 8,292 points. Accel, DST Global, and Tiger Global round out the top five. Among the top 20, two names deserve renewed attention from any founder building a target list. Parkway Venture Capital, founded in 2019, ranks 19th thanks to Figure AI. Notable ranks 20th. Neither is a household name, yet both outperform companies with far greater brand recognition.
Chart: Sequoia leads with 10,158 points; two of the top 20 are names most founders have never encountered.
Ranking, Company, Headquarters, Year Founded, Ranking Score, and Top Investment. Top Investment refers to the single investment that received the highest score according to our methodology, not necessarily the company’s most famous or highest-valued holding.
Chart: All 100 institutions, including their headquarters, founding years, scores, and top trades—62 based in California, 19 in New York, and 6 each in Massachusetts and Texas.
Rounded to the nearest integer. Geographically: 62 of the top 100 companies are headquartered in California, 19 in New York, and 6 each in Massachusetts and Texas. Despite any expansion at the seed and angel investment stages, the core of U.S. venture capital institutions has not left their historical hubs.
This table highlights four modes that are more important to founders than the ranking order itself.
There is an order of magnitude difference between being good and being famous.
Chart: By rank 10, the score is less than one-third of Sequoia’s; by rank 100, the score is 245, with the top-ranked entity scoring 41 times higher than the 100th.
The venture capital power law is often described at the level of individual transactions, but it applies just as powerfully to companies themselves. For founders, this means the gap between a top-decile investor and a merely well-known investor is an order of magnitude—and worth genuine effort to secure.
Counting unicorns tells you almost nothing.
This ranking is not a competition for the number of unicorns. SV Angel invested in approximately 139 unicorns and ranks 31st. Insight Partners invested in approximately 124 unicorns and ranks 28th. Felicis has 58 unicorns and ranks 74th. DST Global has 62 unicorns and ranks 4th. Thrive has 47 unicorns and ranks 8th.
Chart: SV Angel invested in 139 unicorns but ranks 31st; Thrive invested in 47 unicorns and ranks 8th—this method rewards the actual diluted value gained, not the number of logos.
Why do companies with far fewer unicorns rank much higher? Because this method rewards actual value captured, not just the number of top-tier deals. An institution that invested early in a company that later became a unicorn with a small, heavily diluted stake earns a low score: dilution adjustments reduce the ownership percentage, net profit adjustments subtract costs, and in a crowded cap table, an early small position may be worth very little by exit. An institution holding large, concentrated, board-level stakes in a few winners earns significantly more points. On a per-unicorn basis, the institutions with the highest number of unicorns score around 6 points, while the most concentrated institutions score over 80 points.
For founders, this gap reveals which investors are committed and actively involved, and which ones write many small checks, hoping one or two will succeed.
Your best investor might be one you’ve never pitched to.
Bessemer, the oldest among the top 100, has venture capital roots dating back to the 1970s. The youngest, Inflection Ventures, was founded in 2022. Eight of the top 20 were established before 2000, demonstrating the enduring strength of true venture capital brands. However, 21 of the top 100 were founded in 2015 or later, with several rising rapidly due to recent high-growth investments.
Chart: 21 of the top 100 were founded in 2015 or later; performance records compound over time, and a decade is sufficient to build
A group of life sciences investment firms made the list due to therapies rather than software: OrbiMed (27), Atlas Venture (38), ARCH (49), Versant (61), and Sofinnova (75), all ranking based on focused, capital-efficient bets. Native crypto firms such as Paradigm (34), Pantera (76), Multicoin (84), and Polychain (94) made the list through a different kind of opportunity. This approach favors no specific sector—it measures value created, net of costs and decay, regardless of where it occurs.
If you’re starting a business in a specific field, the ideal investor for you may be an expert—and they will never appear at the top of general media rankings.
AI has already begun rewriting the top of the rankings.
Among the top 100, 23 institutions had their highest-scoring single investment in frontier AI or AI infrastructure companies—nearly a quarter of the list. The companies they focused on largely did not exist or were very small five years ago.
Chart: Nearly a quarter of the top 100 listed frontier AI or AI infrastructure companies as their top trades, companies that mostly did not exist or were very small five years ago.
The decay factor means this reshaping occurs in real time. Institutions that made early, concentrated bets on leading AI companies—such as Thrive investing in OpenAI, Menlo investing in Anthropic, and Lightspeed investing in Mistral—will receive immediate returns, rather than waiting years to realize them.
What a ranking cannot tell you
Someone somewhere has already pasted this table into a spreadsheet and sorted it by rank. He’s preparing to email the top 100 institutions in order. I understand the impulse. Ranking lists are appealing precisely because they seem to do the thinking for you.
But if there’s one thing you shouldn’t do, it’s use this list in this way. Nor should you use any list published by Ruben, me, or anyone else in this manner. Rankings are a compressed argument about what is good—the order itself is the least interesting part. What matters is the reasoning behind it. Consider whether that reasoning aligns with what you truly want to do, and examine what your own research reveals when applied to your situation. Read the methodology, challenge the parts you disagree with, and then do your own homework.
Ranks can help narrow your list, but the final decision should be driven by three factors. No score can fully capture any one of them.
Consider fit, not just ranking. This ranking measures diverse strategies with a single ruler. Cross-border and hedge fund-style institutions like Tiger Global (5), DST Global (4), Dragoneer (23), Altimeter (24), Coatue (29), and Greenoaks (44) typically take large minority stakes and rarely, if ever, take board seats. Sequoia and Benchmark adopt a deeply involved, board-heavy model. Sutter Hill (26) almost incubates companies from scratch. All these models score highly because they all create value—but from a founder’s perspective, the experience is vastly different. Founders seeking a deep partnership should choose a different set of institutions from those seeking capital plus autonomy, even within the same top 100. A high ranking doesn’t tell you which type you’re dealing with.
Invest in partners, not brands. One of the most striking facts in our data is that exactly half of the top 100 institutions have no partners in the individual top 100. Institutional strength and individual strength are far from the same thing—that’s precisely why our methodology separates the scores. The people sitting at your board table are not brands—they are individuals. Find out exactly who will be working with you, what else they’re currently handling, and how long they’ve been at the firm. Then conduct background checks on the founders they’ve invested in, including those whose companies failed. How investors perform in down rounds is the most critical information you need. No ranking, including ours, can provide this.
Remember, this is more like a marriage than a transaction. Investors will be your partners for seven, ten, or sometimes fifteen years—longer than many marriages—and much harder to exit. You can sell your house, change your product, or replace your team. But it’s extremely difficult to remove an investor from your cap table or board. This asymmetry should make you slow down—especially when competitive funding rounds pressure you to move faster.
Value-add factors are included in our ranking because deeply engaged investors clearly influence outcomes. But the same board seat that can open a door can also block a sale, overturn strategy, or replace a CEO. So don’t just ask whether an investor will help you win—ask whether you’d want them by your side on your worst day. A slightly lower-ranked investor who truly aligns with your interests is better than a higher-ranked one who doesn’t.
How to use this ranking
Filter by performance. The top 5% generate 90% of the profits and are worth serious effort to engage with. The table above shows you where they are.
Filter by match level: stage, sector, investment amount, and your preferred participation model.
On a deeper level, it’s about the individual. The company gets you the meeting, but for years afterward, you only work with one person.
Do background research on downside risk. Talk to founders who have struggled, don’t just look at the success stories on institutional websites.
What’s next?
We extend the same six factors to individual investors rather than institutions. The contrast with conventional wisdom is even more striking: more than half of our top 100 individual venture capitalists do not appear on the 2026 Forbes Midas List at all. We will also expand the rankings internationally and release industry-specific rankings starting with biotech and AI. We will incorporate verified data for institutions and investors and publish approximately 25 years of historical data, making the rise and fall of institutions directly visible.
Question: Which venture capital firm has performed the best?
Answer: Sequoia Capital leads the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson venture capital ranking with 10,158 points, ahead of Andreessen Horowitz’s 8,292 points and Accel’s 4,576 points. This score measures the actual value realized after accounting for dilution, costs, and time decay.
Question: How much better are top-tier venture capital firms compared to ordinary ones?
Answer: The top-ranked institution scored approximately 41 times higher than the 100th-ranked one. By the time we reach the 10th position, the score has already dropped to less than one-third of Sequoia’s. This indicates that the venture capital power law applies not only to individual deals but also to institutions themselves.
Question: Does investing in more unicorns mean venture capital performs better?
Answer: No. SV Angel invested in approximately 139 unicorns, ranking 31st. Thrive invested in 47, ranking 8th. Rankings reward the actual diluted value realized, not the number of billion-dollar logos.
Question: How concentrated are venture capital returns?
Answer: The top 5% of venture capital firms generate about 90% of the industry’s profits. Therefore, whether your investor is among this 5% is decisive—not a marginal issue.
Question: Do you need an institution with decades of history to become a top-tier venture capital firm?
Answer: No. Twenty-one of the top 100 were founded in 2015 or later. Thus, a well-timed, concentrated holding over a decade is sufficient to stand alongside institutions with 50 years of history.
Question: Which AI companies do top venture capital firms call their best investments?
Answer: Among the top 100, 23 listed a cutting-edge AI or AI infrastructure company as their highest-scoring single investment. OpenAI was nominated by four institutions, xAI by three, and Anthropic and Perplexity each by two.
Question: Where are the best venture capital firms located?
Answer: Of the top 100, 62 are headquartered in California, 19 in New York, and 6 each in Massachusetts and Texas.
