Over the past 50 years, venture capital firms have shaped the U.S. economy into the capitalist behemoth it is today. Many of the biggest companies in the world by market cap, including Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, owe their success in part to VC firms that funded them as they were just starting out, making the VC firms themselves some of the most influential businesses on the planet.
To spotlight the names molding the business landscape, TIME and Statista ranked 350 VC firms at the forefront of catalyzing innovation, supporting emerging startups, and driving the next generation of economic growth. These firms provide direct venture capital funding to companies and startups in various venture stages and sectors as a core part of their business model, and have been ranked based on their fundraising strength in the last five years, their investment capacity, as well as the volume and efficiency of their exits through IPOs and acquisitions.
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Methodology: How TIME and Statista Determined America’s Top Venture Capital Firms of 2025
VC firms provide private equity to young, innovative, and often risky companies that have the potential to make it big. For example, Accel (no. 1 on the list), has funded Scale AI, Facebook, Slack, and Spotify; General Catalyst (no. 2) has funded Airbnb, Mistral AI, and Anduril; Andreessen Horowitz (no. 3) has funded Reddit, Lyft, Roblox, and BeReal.
“We’ve been in business since 1983, investing in technology startups,” says Sameer Gandhi, a partner at Accel. “We want to be the first and lead institutional investor. We want to be there very early. We start with ideas and exceptional people, and we build from there with them.” Accel has been bullish on AI-native companies, including Perplexity and Cursor.
“The internet was driven by venture. Mobile was driven by venture. And AI is being driven by venture,” says Steve Kaplan, a professor at University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Companies choose VCs over more traditional forms of financing like banks because VCs are often willing to take on higher risks, but they also offer more mentoring, help startups build a management team and connect them to suppliers and customers.
For Accel, being intimately involved with supporting companies at the very early stages, offering not only financial backing, but knowledge and perspectives on the industry, is what gives the firm its edge. Slack and CrowdStrike, for example, were early investments that Accel funded all the way up to the IPO. Notably, Accel was one of the first investors in Scale AI and led a $1 billion fundraising round for the company in 2024. Now, the firm is reportedly expected to receive a payout of $2.5 billion from Meta’s acquisition of Scale, according to Bloomberg.
Although tech startups are the more splashy names in portfolios, VC firms invest in cutting edge ideas across industries, propping up companies from Home Depot to mRNA vaccine maker Moderna to FedEx. “The small number of [U.S. businesses] that get venture funding—those are disproportionately the big winners. [VC firms] are very good at selecting the ones that are going to blossom. And then they’re also very good at, for the most part, setting up incentives and governance that leads to success,” Kaplan says. That doesn’t make what these firms do easy. “If you look at the deals venture capitalists invest in, more than half lose money,” he notes. “It’s the few big winners that offset the failures.”
Most of the VC firms on the list are based on the coasts—more than half have their headquarters in California, home to Silicon Valley, followed by New York, Massachusetts, and emerging startup hubs like Texas. Drive (no. 93) is a rarity, headquartered in the Midwest, and its CEO Chris Olsen sees that as an advantage. Olsen, who grew up in Ohio, left Sequoia Capital in 2012 to co-found Drive out of Columbus. “By the time I left,” he says, “the technological breakthrough in cloud computing suddenly meant that you didn’t have to be in Silicon Valley.” Today, Drive is a $2 billion firm with brands like Duolingo in its portfolio and a pipeline of more than a dozen near-IPO companies that generate over $100 million in revenue.
“There’s $18 trillion of GDP between the coasts,” says Olsen, and founders in the heartland of America have the bonus of hands-on experience and domain knowledge in their industry whether that’s welding or healthcare, making them well-suited to understand how new technologies like mobile or cloud or AI will work in the real world. “We’re bringing the venture to the founders. We’re encouraging them to stay close to their research, their families, their networks, their customers.”
But while the VC firm is a fundamentally American business model, some, like 500 Global (no. 41), have a more worldwide vision. With a team spread across 20 different countries and a portfolio that represents more than 80 countries, 500 Global prides itself in supporting startups across many markets around the world. “If you look at our portfolio, our team, particularly amongst leadership and the investment partners, it looks very different from a lot of venture firms. It’s quite diverse,” says Christine Tsai, CEO and founding partner of 500 Global. Her firm is defying a glaring diversity and gender gap in the VC industry, both on the founder and investor side, even though research shows that having more female partners improves fund performances and female-founded companies tend to perform better in the long run.
“The fact that our team is so diverse, and we want to invest in great founders everywhere in industries or sectors or customer segments that a lot of people would overlook, that has led to what you see today,” Tsai says. Around 30% of 500 Global’s portfolio has at least one female founder and 53% of their managing partners are women. Good examples of what the firm loves to invest in include Australian unicorn Canva (led by CEO Melanie Perkins), Sakana AI (which has a presence in Japan and Silicon Valley), and Play AI (a voice AI startup recently acquired by Meta with international co-founders).
See the full list of top VC firms below:
Applications are a key part of the project’s selection process. For next year’s list, the application period is expected to open in spring 2026. To be notified when it begins, you can register here.