This is a guest article by Ilya Strebulaev.
He teaches VC and PE classes at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and leads the Stanford GSB’s Venture Capital Initiative. He publishes venture capital research, investor rankings and fundraising guides for founders in his newsletter.
Every founder raising from venture capitalists has heard the same names: Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark. But one number should shape your fundraising strategy more than any of them. By my estimates, about 5% of venture capitalists have generated roughly 90% of the industry’s profits. If you are choosing whom to take money from, the question that matters most is whether your investor sits in that 5%. Fame is an imperfect proxy for it.
Until now there has been no transparent, fully data-driven way to answer that question. The list the industry leans on, the Forbes Midas List, is largely a black box. When we tried to reverse-engineer it from its own disclosed methodology, even our best-fitting replication left 49 of its own top 100 absent from the actual list. Among investors who appear on both our ranking and Midas, the correlation is only about 0.27.
So together with Blake Jackson I built an alternative: the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson Venture Ranking, drawn from more than 230,000 investments by nearly 13,000 venture capitalists across more than 5,000 firms over a 30-year window. Every point traces back to a specific investment in a specific company on a specific date. We apply no editorial judgment, make no manual adjustments and do not rely on firms submitting their own numbers.
This article contains the complete top 100, the methodology behind it and, because a ranking alone will not get you a good investor, what to do with it once you have it.
What the score actually measures
Six factors drive it. They are worth reading closely, because between them they reward the behavior a founder should want from an investor.
Valuation, honestly discounted. Two companies can both be described as worth $100 billion when one figure is a public market capitalization and the other a private post-money valuation. These are not the same number, because the preferred stock VCs buy carries downside protections that common stock lacks. My work with Will Gornall put the average overstatement for unicorns near 50%. We discount private valuations uniformly.
Dilution. A 10% stake at the first round is not a 10% stake at exit. Two companies can both sell for $1 billion, but if one raised four rounds along the way, its early investors were diluted round after round. We track each investment’s ownership down through every subsequent round.
Net profit. Turning $10 million into $2 billion is a different achievement from turning $1 billion into the same $2 billion. Subtracting the cost of every investment rewards capital efficiency and penalizes spraying large checks to manufacture a few headline wins. In our data, roughly three-quarters of investments returned negative net profits.
Value add. Investors who lead rounds and take board seats contribute more than passive check-writers, and we award additional points for those roles.
Human-capital decay. A VC’s skill, network and judgment depreciate if not continuously exercised. We discount each investment by time elapsed, using a half-life of three years: a dollar of value created in 2022 is worth about fifty cents in 2025, and a quarter if it was created in 2019. This keeps the ranking current, rewarding investors who are good now rather than those resting on a single brilliant bet from two decades ago.
Credit between firm and individual. Investors move between firms, so when a partner who made their best deals at one firm decamps to another, both firms deserve some credit. We split it, giving a quarter to the firm where the investment was made and three-quarters to the firm where the partner works now. That reflects academic evidence that most return variation traces to individuals rather than institutions.
The 2026 results: top firms
Sequoia tops the ranking with 10,158 points. Andreessen Horowitz is second with 8,292. Accel, DST Global and Tiger Global round out the top five. Two names in that top 20 deserve a second look from any founder building a target list. Parkway Venture Capital, founded in 2019, sits at 19 on the strength of Figure AI. Notable ranks 20th. Neither is a household name, and both outrank firms whose brands are far better known.
Rank, firm, headquarters, year founded, ranking score and top deal. The top deal is the single highest-scoring investment for that firm under our methodology, not necessarily its most famous or highest-valued holding.
Scores are integer-rounded. On geography: 62 of the top 100 firms are headquartered in California, 19 in New York, and six each in Massachusetts and Texas. Whatever broadening has happened at the seed and angel level, the institutional core of US venture has not left its historical home.
Four patterns in this table matter more to a founder than the order itself.
The gap between good and famous is an order of magnitude
By rank 10 the score has dropped to roughly 3,000, less than a third of Sequoia’s. By rank 100 it is 245. The top firm scores about 41 times the hundredth.
Venture’s power law, usually described at the level of individual deals, applies just as forcefully to the firms themselves. For a founder, that means the difference between a top-decile investor and a merely well-known one is an order of magnitude, and worth real effort to close.
Counting unicorns tells you almost nothing
The ranking is not a unicorn-counting contest. SV Angel has backed roughly 139 unicorns yet ranks 31st. Insight Partners has invested in about 124 and ranks 28th. Felicis has some 58 unicorns to its name and sits at 74th. Meanwhile DST Global, with 62 unicorns, ranks 4th, and Thrive is 8th with 47.
How can a firm with a fraction of the unicorn count rank far higher? Because the methodology rewards value actually captured rather than the number of top deals. A firm that wrote a tiny, heavily diluted check into a company that later became a unicorn gets less credit for it: the dilution adjustment shrinks the stake, the net-profit adjustment subtracts the cost, and a small early position in a crowded cap table can be worth much less by exit. A firm that took a large, concentrated, board-level position in a smaller number of winners gets a great deal of credit. Expressed as points per unicorn, the spread runs from around six for the highest-volume names to more than eighty for the most concentrated.
For founders, that spread reveals which investors commit and stay involved, and which are writing many small checks in the hope that one or two of them land.
Your best investor may be one you have never pitched
The oldest firm in the top 100, Bessemer, traces its venture capital roots to the 1970s. The youngest, Inflection Ventures, was founded in 2022. Eight of the top 20 predate 2000, a testament to how durable a genuine venture franchise can be. Yet twenty-one of the 100 firms were founded in 2015 or later, and several rocketed up on a single recent, fast-appreciating bet.
A cluster of life-sciences firms earns a place on therapeutics rather than software: OrbiMed (27), Atlas Venture (38), ARCH (49), Versant (61) and Sofinnova (75), all ranking on concentrated, capital-efficient bets. Crypto-native firms such as Paradigm (34), Pantera (76), Multicoin (84) and Polychain (94) rank on a different opportunity set again. The methodology does not privilege any sector; it measures value created, net of cost and decay, wherever it occurs.
If you are building in a specific space, the best-performing investor for you may be a specialist who will never appear near the top of a generalist media list.
AI is already rewriting the top of the table
For 23 of the 100 firms, the single highest-scoring investment is a frontier-AI or AI-infrastructure company. That is nearly a quarter of the list, anchored to a wave of companies most of which did not exist, or were tiny, five years ago.
The decay factor means this reshaping happens in real time. Firms that placed early, concentrated bets on the leading AI companies, such as Thrive on OpenAI, Menlo on Anthropic and Lightspeed on Mistral, are rewarded immediately rather than years after the fact.
What a ranking cannot tell you
Somewhere out there, a founder is already pasting this table into a spreadsheet, sorting by rank and preparing to email firms one through one hundred in that order. I understand the impulse. Ranked lists are seductive precisely because they appear to do your thinking for you.
But if there is one thing you should not do with this list, or with any list that Ruben or I or anybody else publishes, it is exactly that. A ranking is an argument about what counts as good, compressed into a single number. The order is the least interesting part of it. What matters is the reasoning underneath, whether that reasoning matches what you are actually trying to build, and what your own research turns up when you apply it to your own situation. Read the methodology, disagree with the parts you want to disagree with, then go and do the work yourself.
A ranking can narrow your list, but three things should drive the final choice, and no score fully captures any of them.
Think about fit, not only rank. The ranking applies one yardstick to many playbooks. Crossover and hedge-fund-style firms such as Tiger Global (5), DST Global (4), Dragoneer (23), Altimeter (24), Coatue (29) and Greenoaks (44) tend to take large minority stakes with few or no board seats. Sequoia and Benchmark run deeply involved, board-heavy models. Sutter Hill (26) has effectively incubated companies from scratch. These models all score well, because they all create value, but from the founder’s chair they feel nothing alike. A founder who wants an engaged thought partner and a founder who wants capital plus autonomy should be targeting different firms from the same top 100. A high rank cannot tell you which of the two you are dealing with.
Diligence the partner, not the logo. One of the most striking facts in our data is that fully half of our top 100 firms have no partner in our individual top 100. Firm strength and individual strength are far from the same thing, which is precisely why our methodology splits credit between them. The brand does not sit on your board; a person does. Ask who specifically will work with you, what else they are carrying and how long they have been at the firm. Then reference-check that person with founders they have backed, including the ones whose companies did not work out. How an investor behaves in a down round is the information you most need, and no ranking, ours included, can supply it.
Remember that this is closer to a marriage than a transaction. An investor is your partner for seven, ten, sometimes fifteen years. That is longer than many marriages and considerably harder to exit. You can sell your house, change your product or replace your team. You cannot easily remove an investor from your cap table or your board. That asymmetry should make you slow down at precisely the moment a competitive round pressures you to speed up.
The value-add factor exists in our ranking because involved investors demonstrably contribute to outcomes. But the same board seat that opens a door can block a sale, override a strategy or replace a chief executive. So ask not only whether an investor will help you win, but whether you want this person in the room on your worst day. A slightly lower-ranked investor who is genuinely aligned with you will beat a higher-ranked one who is not.
How to use this list
Screen for performance. The 5% who generate 90% of the profits are worth real effort to reach, and the table above tells you where they are.
Filter for fit. Stage, sector, check size and the model of involvement you actually want.
Go one level deeper, to the individual. The firm gets you the meeting, but you will be working with one person for years afterwards.
Reference-check the downside. Talk to founders whose companies struggled, not only the trophy logos on a firm’s website.
What comes next
We are extending the same six factors to individual investors rather than firms, and there the contrast with conventional wisdom is sharper still: More than half of our top 100 individual VCs appear nowhere on the 2026 Forbes Midas List. We will also extend the rankings internationally, release industry-focused rankings starting with biotech and AI, incorporate verified submissions from firms and investors, and publish the time series back roughly 25 years so the rise and fall of franchises can be seen directly.
Subscribe to get them first here.
FAQs:
Q: Which VC firm performs best?
A: Sequoia leads the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson Venture Ranking with 10,158 points, ahead of Andreessen Horowitz at 8,292 and Accel at 4,576. The score measures value captured after dilution, cost, and time decay.
Q: How much better is a top VC firm than an average one?
A: The top firm scores roughly 41 times the hundredth-ranked firm. By rank 10 the score has already fallen to under a third of Sequoia’s, which shows venture’s power law applies to firms rather than only to deals.
Q: Does backing more unicorns mean a VC performs better?
A: No. SV Angel has backed around 139 unicorns and ranks 31st, while Thrive has backed 47 and ranks 8th. The ranking rewards value actually captured after dilution rather than the number of billion-dollar logos.
Q: How concentrated are venture capital returns?
A: The top 5% of VCs have generated roughly 90% of the industry’s profits, which makes whether your investor sits inside that 5% the decision rather than a marginal one.
Q: Do you need a decades-old firm to be a top VC?
A: No. Twenty-one of the top 100 firms were founded in 2015 or later, so a decade of concentrated, well-timed positions is enough to rank alongside firms with fifty-year histories.
Q: Which AI companies do top VC firms name as their best investment?
A: Twenty-three of the top 100 name a frontier-AI or AI-infrastructure company as their single highest-scoring deal. OpenAI is named by four firms, xAI by three, and Anthropic and Perplexity by two each.
Q: Where are the best VC firms based?
A: Of the top 100, 62 are headquartered in California, 19 in New York, and six each in Massachusetts and Texas.
Incredible insights.
Great research, Ilya! But please stop framing it as “an alternative to the Midas List.” Forbes’ Midas List is sponsor-backed and doesn’t include a single(!) actual performance metric.