The Seed 100 and Seed 40 lists have reached their sixth year in our partnership with Business Insider, which objectively identifies and celebrates the success of some of the world’s greatest seed investors.
In the run of these Seed 100 releases, AI has emerged as a defining characteristic of seed-stage startups today, with results that will likely drive the rankings for years to come.
To produce the 2026 lists, we statistically analyzed seed investor performance in 25 areas using Crunchbase and PitchBook data. We also accept direct track record submissions to this form.
Since we aim to analyze the potential success of investors rather than focus solely on past achievements, we consider only active investors with at least five investments between 2011 and 2026. Our list includes solo venture capitalists and angel investors worldwide, assessed based on their investments in US companies.
The investors that made the cut for the 2026 Seed 100 were those with the strongest long-term indicators: exits (IPOs or acquisitions). Investors with a previous AI footprint have benefited significantly in their rankings this year.
To be named to the list, seed investors must have:
- Investments that led to successful exits, including successful IPOs or acquisitions (exits that were meaningfully above “liquidation preference” or demonstrated increased company value rather than simply raising capital).
- Intermediate signs of future success with seed investments consistently receiving material sums of follow-on investment.
- Still be in the game. Great investments 10 years ago will not carry an investor into the list if they are no longer active.
Exits (IPOs or acquisitions) statistically have the greatest influence on investor differentiation. We also updated our methodology this year to weigh more recent investments for the intermediate milestones, such as follow-on fundraising.
This year, the candidate pool meeting the above criteria included 1,974 investors, a 5% increase from last year’s. Women comprised 11% of all seed investors in scope, up 8% from the release of the first Seed 100 in 2021.
This year’s final list included 22 investors who increased their rank, 30 with the same or lower rank, and 48 new investors. Twenty-seven investors in this year’s ranking were also featured in the original 2021 Seed 100 list.
An improved model of investment activity
Our models have always factored in how active investors are, with investors estimated to do little to no investing ranked lower. However, investment activity has fluctuated over the years. While seed investment coverage across major data providers is spotty, we can still obtain trend estimates by analyzing aggregate statistics.
Below, we show the total number of seed investments divided by the number of active seed investors in the US from 2010 to the present. This is based on the set of investors that are input into our Seed 100 and Seed 40 models. The total count fluctuates a lot, by up to 50% over the timeframe of the Seed 100 series, and by more over a longer timeframe.
Source: Crunchbase and Termina analysis. Active investors are seed investors who have made a recent investment in the US.
We changed this indicator to act more predominantly as a simple gate to remove investors who were clearly inactive. The Seed 100 and Seed 40 aim to help the ecosystem navigate, find, and celebrate great seed investors. Our updated activity logic is more inclusive across investment strategies, while still emphasizing investors still in the game.
We plan to improve the model in the future by including a new counter-consensus indicator around sector selection. Some may view sector selection as one of the important insights of a great seed investor — the visionary investors of the past 10 years had big AI bets.
What the future holds is up in the air, and we do not want the ranking to overemphasize recent success given current market conditions.
Jake Ellowitz is the chief technology officer and cofounder of Termina, which works with venture capital and private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds, and executives to assess investment opportunities. Jake is also a cofounding partner at Tribe Capital.
Michael Mao is a data scientist at Termina focused on quantitative underwriting and statistical modeling.
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