Top AI Series B lead investors
In April, DST Global’s Cole Rotman created a sheet to track Series A leads in every $5bn+ venture-backed company. From this list, we analyzed the top Series B lead investors here.
Inspired by Rotman, A*’s Bennett Siegel has now applied a similar approach to identifying the lead seed investors from every AI unicorn founded since the transformer paper landed. He points out that none of these unicorns has come out of YC, and no one except Andreessen Horowitz has led or co-led more than two seeds.
Our post here piggybacks on Siegel’s list to analyze the top AI Series B lead investors from the same list of companies. We see that General Catalyst and Kleiner Perkins have each led three of the leading AI Series Bs.
SignalRank is an investor in five (or 26%) of the 19 companies from this list that have raised a Series B since we started to invest.
AI Series B lead investors
Before we look into this, two major caveats to Siegel’s list:
This list ignores any companies founded prior to 2017. OpenAI is the most glaring omission.
It is so early in the AI tech cycle. None of these companies has achieved maturity.
26 of the 37 AI unicorn companies from Siegel’s list (shown in Figure 1) have raised a Series B or subsequent round.
It is perhaps more remarkable that 11 of these $1bn+ valued companies have not raised a Series B yet. $1bn+ valuations can be achieved at “seed” alone these days. SSI, founded in June 2024, has a rumored valuation of $32bn pre-product.
The potential size of the AI prize is the justification for such valuations; investing in SSI today is an option on it becoming the next OpenAI, which itself is valued at $300bn. VenCap’s David Clark showed how the top 1% of exits is 7x larger than 20 years ago, whereas the top 1% of funds has only increased ~2x.
Figure 1. Lead investors in AI unicorn Series Bs since 2017
Kleiner Perkins & General Catalyst have led the most Series Bs into subsequent AI unicorns (Figure 2). Kleiner Perkins has a strong hit rate of 33% when they lead a Series B into an AI company (using Crunchbase data). Bain Capital Ventures follows with two lead investments.
FTX (Anthropic), Altman Capital (Owner) & Redpoint (Owner) remarkably have a 100% hit rate when they lead at Series B in an AI company.
Conversely the hit rate of the following is below 10% when they are leading a AI Series B: Spark Capital, Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed and Tiger Global. The comparison may be a little unfair as these firms have been ramping up their AI investments such that almost none of the non-unicorn Series Bs will have yet achieved maturity.
Figure 2. Ranked Series B lead investors in AI unicorns since 2017
AI Series B investments (incl lead & non-lead investments)
If we expand the analysis to look at all Series B investments (lead & non-lead) into this list of AI unicorn companies, we generate Figure 3.
General Catalyst is again the #1 investor with eight Series B investments into AI unicorns since 2017, from 39 Series B investments into all AI companies since 2017, implying a 21% unicorn hit rate.
SignalRank is ranked #4= on this methodology by number of AI unicorn investments at Series B, with an implied 31% hit rate to date.
Again, it is early as none of these Series B investments is yet to achieve maturity.
Figure 3. Top 10 investors by number of Series B investments into AI unicorns
Concluding thoughts
There are no real surprise names in this list.
The lead investors here echo the analysis from the prior post on Series Bs in $5bn+ companies (where General Catalyst was also the #1 lead investor by number of Series B investments into $5bn+ companies.
Persistence of famed multi-stage firms continues to be strong. Newer names of significance in this cycle at Series B are Thrive Capital, NFDG & Altman Capital.
It is perhaps noteworthy to see a strategic investor (NVIDIA) leaning into investing so early in development of a technology cycle and so early in the development of these companies (at Series B). NVIDIA has strong visibility in this space, so will be able to ascertain what is doing well. They have also perhaps learnt from prior technology cycles to try to hedge against the innovator’s dilemma – if you’re going to be disrupted, at least own a portion of the upside.
We caution (again) that most of these Series Bs took place in the last two years, such that the companies are yet to fully develop. It is still early in the development of the AI cycle.