Top 55 Most Active Seed Investors in 2024

Top 55 most active VC seed investors according to data and why founders might not want to target them.

December 5, 2024

Are you looking for Seed VC investors that are actually writing Seed checks into U.S.-based startups?

We’ve got the perfect list for you based on data.

One thing I’ve learned about funds as an early-stage investor is that they don’t make investments regularly.

Some funds that were making a ton of seed investments last year, hardly made any this year. Other formerly active investors made none or have shut down.

That’s why I hope this list of the most active funds in the past year will be useful to founders, so you can actually focus on those funds that are making seed investments currently.

Here is a ranking of the most active Seed investors in 2024:

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#	Investor	Investments
1	Y Combinator*	942
2	Alumni Ventures	64
3	SOSV*	43
4	General Catalyst	33
5	Gaingels†	32
6	Plug and Play Tech Center*	31
7	Techstars*	30
8	Accel	28
9	500 Global*	26
10	Sequoia Capital	25
11	Andreessen Horowitz	24
12	First Round Capital	23
13	Insight Partners	22
14	Bessemer Venture Partners	21
15	Lightspeed Venture Partners	20
16	New Enterprise Associates	20
17	Coatue Management	19
18	Initialized Capital	19
19	Kleiner Perkins	18
20	Felicis Ventures	17
21	Lux Capital	16
22	Founders Fund	15
23	Index Ventures	15
24	Tiger Global Management	14
25	Union Square Ventures	14
26	Village Global	14
27	Anthemis Group	13
28	Craft Ventures	13
29	Mayfield Fund	13
30	Bain Capital Ventures	12
31	DCVC	12
32	Global Founders Capital	12
33	Greylock Partners	12
34	BetaWorks	11
35	Blume Ventures	11
36	Correlation Ventures	11
37	Founder Collective	11
38	GV (formerly Google Ventures)	10
39	Lowercarbon Capital	10
40	Northzone	10
41	Redpoint Ventures	10
42	Stripes Group	10
43	Aspect Ventures	9
44	Bain & Company Ventures	9
45	Benchmark	9
46	Boldstart Ventures	9
47	Builders VC	9
48	Canaan Partners	9
49	Crosslink Capital	9
50	FirstMark Capital	9
51	Greylock X Fund	9
52	NextView Ventures	9
53	Peak Ventures	9
54	Rainfall Ventures	9
55	8VC	8
56	Altos Ventures	8
57	Battery Ventures	8
58	Binance Labs	8
59	Connetic Ventures	8
60	Forerunner Ventures	8
61	Lerer Hippeau	8
62	Lightspeed Scout Program	8
63	Matrix Partners	8
64	NFX	8
65	Obvious Ventures	8
66	Polaris Partners	8
67	RRE Ventures	8
68	Sapphire Ventures	8
69	Shasta Ventures	8
70	Thrive Capital	8
71	True Ventures	8
72	Wing Venture Capital	8
73	Wisdom Ventures	8

_{All investors market with * are accelerator or have accelerators, but this ranking only counts their seed investments, which are usually follow-ons. All investors market with a † are angel groups. All data via}_Crunchbase_.

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Accelerators Make a Lot of Follow-on Seed Investments

You might have noticed that many of the top seed investors are accelerators (e.g. Y Combinator and SOSV) or have accelerator programs (e.g. Plug and Play). Their seed investments are often into portfolio companies that have gone through their accelerator programs, but not always.

Even the Most Active Seed Investors Make Few Investments

Another striking observation is that many funds on this list make only a handful of seed investments in a year. Well-known funds like Lerer Hippeau, Forerunner Ventures, Bettery Ventures, and Benchmark are making less than 10 seed investments in a 12-month period. That’s less than one seed investment per month.

It’s Better to Target Smaller Funds

Finally, the sum of the seed investments made in this list is 1,138. This is from a sample size of 3,897 or just 29% of all seed investments. What this implies is that founders might be better off targeting smaller funds since they account for more than two-thirds of seed investments.

Notes

The data set for this analysis includes seed investments into companies based in the U.S. from November 2023 to October 2024. This list will be updated periodically with newer data when available.

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