The Crunchbase rating of active startup investors in the second quarter of 2024 looked completely different than a yr earlier.
First, nearly all of the most active enterprise capitalists were busier in the second quarter of this yr. Second, several names topped the list of busiest and biggest spenders — including Khosla’s ventures, CoatAND Acceleration — a yr ago they were much lower.
To illustrate how active investors compare, we used Crunchbase data to rank them across multiple categories, including variety of enterprise capital deals, lead investment spend, and variety of customer acquisition rounds.
The most active investors after the seed stage
We’ll start with the most post-seed investors, counting who participated in the most enterprise and growth rounds. Below are the top seven, comparing Q2 to year-ago levels:
Khosla Ventures’ Q2 is its first quarter at the top of the rankings since we began reporting them a few years ago. The Silicon Valley-based software, biotech, and cleantech firm participated in 26 deals last quarter.
Second and third place were taken by: Sequoia Capital AND Lightspeed Venture Partnerstwo long-standing enterprise capital powerhouses that have significantly increased their level of activity over the past yr.
Meanwhile Andreessen Horowitzwhich was the most active in this category in the first quarter, actually slowed down a bit, falling to fourth place.
The most distinguished investors
Next, we are going to take a look at the investors who invested the most money in lead financing rounds in Q2.
This isn’t an exact science, since multiple-backer rounds almost never share how much each investor put in. However, we are able to hazard an educated guess by looking at the total dollars that went into lead rounds backed by specific investors, since lead backers are likely to contribute a sizable chunk.
Using this approach, here are the ten “costliest” investors leading into Q2 2024:
In this rating, Andreessen once again topped the list due to its role as the lead investor in large financing rounds in the second quarter for firms such as Wizard, Bio Formation, Hebbia AND Talkiatry.
Next up is Coatue, mainly as a consequence of his role as the lead investor in Weave Core$1.1 billion C SeriesIn third place was Accel, which led AI scales1 billion dollars F-Series.
The most active leading investors
We also looked at which investors led or co-led the largest variety of enterprise capital financing rounds.
By this measure, Khosla Ventures was in the lead, followed by Accel and Andreessen. Here are the top eight firms by this measure:
It is price noting that every one of our active lead investors accomplished significantly more transactions in the last quarter than a yr earlier.
Artificial intelligence at the wheel
Why have active investors change into busier in recent months? Well, AI is clearly a factor, as AI took a record share of worldwide funding in Q2. Most of the top active VCs made multiple deals in this space during the quarter, including all of the top top investors by variety of rounds.
Total investment also increased, with early stage deals in particular up sharply from year-ago levels. While this didn’t translate into more reported rounds, it does appear that the most active investors are accelerating the pace of deals.