The Seed 100: What the Best Early-Stage Investors of 2026 Reveal About Venture Capital
Business Insider’s 2026 Seed 100 is led by Walter Kortschak of Firestreak Ventures, followed by Jesse Robbins of Heavybit, Gaurav Jain of Afore Capital, Ed Sim of Boldstart Ventures and Bradley Horowitz of Wisdom Ventures. Their portfolios include companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir, Instacart, Shield AI, Snyk, Slack and Scale AI.
The names are impressive, but the ranking is more useful when read as evidence of how seed investing is changing. The best early-stage investor is no longer necessarily the person writing a modest cheque to two founders working from a spare bedroom. Seed rounds can now reach tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, particularly when an experienced artificial-intelligence researcher or repeat founder is involved. At the same time, many ordinary startups still need less than $2 million to prove that customers will pay for their product.
This has created an unusually wide market in which a $500,000 pre-seed round and a billion-dollar financing may both be described as early-stage capital. For founders, the practical challenge is not simply to identify the most prestigious investor. It is to find one whose cheque size, expertise, expectations and ability to support the next financing round fit the company being built.
How the Seed 100 is calculated
The Seed 100 is not a survey of which venture capitalists are most visible on social media or most frequently quoted in the press. Business Insider compiled the 2026 list using analysis supplied by Termina, a software platform spun out of Tribe Capital.
Eligible investors had made at least five active investments between 2011 and 2026. Their portfolio companies also needed to have demonstrated measurable progress through further financing, an acquisition or a public listing. The methodology rewards the investor’s ability to enter early and back companies that subsequently create value.
That approach matters because venture capital operates according to a power law. Most investments do not produce exceptional returns, while a small number of winners account for a disproportionate share of a fund’s performance.
Dealroom’s separate 2026 Power Law Investor Ranking illustrates how severe the distribution can be. Its data cover nearly 20,000 investors that have made disclosed seed investments. Approximately 89 percent have never backed a seed-stage company that later reached more than $100 million in annual revenue. Only 28 investors in its dataset had produced at least 11 such businesses.
Being able to identify even one exceptional company early is therefore unusual. Doing it repeatedly is the characteristic that rankings such as the Seed 100 are attempting to capture.
The investors at the top
Walter Kortschak takes first place in the 2026 Seed 100. Now investing through his family office, Firestreak Ventures, he has backed OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir, Polymarket and SpaceX. His position demonstrates one advantage enjoyed by established individual investors: they can deploy personal or family capital with greater flexibility than a conventional venture fund governed by a fixed mandate.
Second-ranked Jesse Robbins brings a different form of credibility. Before becoming a general partner at Heavybit, he co-founded the infrastructure software company Chef and worked at Amazon, where he helped develop practices associated with chaos engineering. His investments include developer infrastructure, robotics and defence companies such as Fastly, Figure AI and Shield AI.
Gaurav Jain, ranked third, represents the institutionalised pre-seed model. Afore Capital is designed to invest before a company has developed meaningful traction and, in some cases, before it has a finished product. Its approach depends heavily on evaluating the founders’ speed, judgement and ability to learn rather than relying on conventional revenue metrics.
Ed Sim of Boldstart Ventures, in fourth place, concentrates on enterprise software, cybersecurity and artificial-intelligence infrastructure. Bradley Horowitz, ranked fifth, combines operating experience at Google with investments in businesses including OpenAI, Anthropic, Slack, Ramp and Scale AI.
These investors do not follow one formula. Some are former founders or operators; others have spent decades in institutional venture capital. Some invest personal capital, while others manage specialised funds. What connects them is access to promising founders, the ability to make decisions before the evidence is complete and a record of remaining useful as the company develops.
AI has stretched the meaning of seed capital
The most consequential shift in the 2026 ranking is the increasing concentration of capital around artificial intelligence and other frontier technologies.
A traditional seed investment was intended to finance the first product, initial hires and early customer testing. That remains true for many software and consumer businesses. Frontier AI companies, however, may require expensive computing infrastructure, elite technical teams and substantial capital before releasing a commercial product.
Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab reportedly raised $2 billion in its seed financing in 2025. In March 2026, Advanced Machine Intelligence, co-founded by former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, announced a seed round of more than $1 billion. These are not conventional experiments financed by small venture funds. They are large strategic wagers on scarce talent and an anticipated technological market.
Business Insider also points to a reduction in rounds below $5 million and an increase in those above $10 million. The implication is not that every seed round is becoming enormous. Rather, the market is separating into two tracks.
One consists of capital-intensive AI, defence, robotics, biotechnology and infrastructure companies able to attract large amounts before establishing revenue. The other contains the much broader population of startups still expected to demonstrate product-market fit with relatively restrained funding.
Founders should be careful not to use the first group as a benchmark for the second. Raising an oversized round may create an impressive headline, but it also increases the valuation that the company must justify and can make the next financing more difficult when progress falls short of expectations.
A celebrated investor may still be the wrong investor
Rankings evaluate past performance. A founder must assess future working compatibility.
The first issue is stage. An investor who describes a firm as “early stage” may prefer leading $8 million Series A rounds rather than investing €500,000 in an untested European startup. Founders should examine the investor’s most recent transactions, not only the historic companies displayed on the website.
Cheque size is equally important. A large multistage fund can write a small seed cheque, but the investment may be financially insignificant to it. A specialist seed fund committing a similar amount may have a much stronger incentive to help with recruitment, product decisions and the next round.
The founder should also determine who will perform the work after the investment. The senior partner conducting the pitch meeting may not be the person attending board meetings or responding when the company encounters difficulty. References should therefore cover the individual partner, not just the reputation of the firm.
Sector experience can be valuable when it produces relevant introductions or informed judgement. It becomes less useful when it creates portfolio conflicts. A founder should ask whether the investor has backed a direct or emerging competitor, how confidential information is managed and whether the firm reserves the right to finance competing businesses.
Geography also matters. A prominent Silicon Valley investor may bring access to American customers and later-stage funds but understand little about European regulation, employment practices or public funding. Conversely, a regional investor may be highly effective locally but unable to support an American expansion. The appropriate choice depends on where the company expects to build, sell and raise capital.
Five questions founders should ask before accepting an offer
A term sheet should be assessed as the beginning of a long commercial relationship, not simply as an injection of cash.
First, what does the investor expect the company to prove before the next round? The answer exposes whether both sides agree about the next 18 to 24 months.
Second, how much capital has the fund reserved for follow-on investments? A fund that invests at seed but cannot participate later may create a financing gap or send an unintended negative signal to the market.
Third, how does the investor behave when performance deteriorates? Founders should speak to companies that struggled, changed direction or failed to raise another round. References supplied only by successful portfolio businesses provide an incomplete picture.
Fourth, what ownership, governance and information rights are being requested? The highest valuation is not necessarily the best offer when it is accompanied by restrictive control provisions, an oversized option pool or terms that complicate later financing.
Fifth, what can the investor deliver that the company could not obtain independently? Relevant answers might include recruiting a specialist technical team, opening a regulated market, securing design partners or preparing for a credible Series A. Vague promises of “network access” deserve further examination.
What rankings cannot measure well
A data-led ranking naturally favours visible financial outcomes. It can identify investors who entered companies before major financing rounds, acquisitions or listings, but it cannot fully determine how much each investor contributed to those results.
A small investor may have recognised the opportunity early but provided little help afterwards. Another may have spent years supporting a company that produced a respectable rather than spectacular return. The first is more likely to rank highly, although the second might be the better partner for a first-time founder.
Rankings can also be affected by survivorship bias and delays in performance data. A recent investment may be excellent but too young to produce a measurable outcome. Valuation is another imperfect indicator: a private company can achieve unicorn status through a funding round without building a durable business or returning money to investors.
Dealroom attempts to address this by combining valuation milestones with revenue outcomes and giving greater weight to investors who entered at seed rather than at later stages. Its model nevertheless measures portfolio results, not personal chemistry, integrity or the quality of support delivered during a crisis.
For founders, a ranking should therefore be treated as a starting point for due diligence. It identifies investors with unusual records, but it does not replace direct references or a careful assessment of incentives.
What the 2026 list says about the market
The Seed 100 shows that early-stage investing is becoming both more data-driven and more dependent on access. Investors increasingly use software to identify founders, compare companies and monitor portfolio performance. Yet the largest opportunities, particularly in AI, are frequently allocated through trusted professional networks before a conventional fundraising process begins.
It also shows that specialist knowledge retains value. Investors with operating experience in developer tools, enterprise security, healthcare, fintech or infrastructure can assess technical and commercial risks that generalist capital may miss.
Most importantly, the list demonstrates why the investor-selection process should run in both directions. Venture capitalists evaluate whether a founder can build a company capable of returning the fund. Founders should apply comparable discipline to determining whether the investor has the attention, expertise, capital and temperament to help them do it.
A place on the Seed 100 is credible evidence of past investment judgement. It is not, by itself, evidence that an investor is right for a particular company. The best early-stage investor for a founder is not always the most famous person prepared to join the round, but the one whose resources and incentives remain aligned after the announcement has been forgotten.
