Last year, Top VC Firms: The 2025 Performance Rankings described a market where AI companies were capturing 31 percent of global funding. AI’s share of global venture funding hit 80 percent in the first quarter of 2026, up from 55 percent the year before. The list of top VC firms below has moved with it, and underneath the rankings sits a separate number most firms are not putting in their own press releases.
Small Raises: Top VC Firms Dominating $1M-$10M Rounds
Sequoia Capital remains the top name at seed, though its assets under management are now reported anywhere between $56 billion and $90 billion depending on methodology, a wide enough range that even the industry’s most famous firm has become hard to pin to one number.
First Round Capital and Initialized Capital have both held their positions rather than lost them, still the two names most cited by founders raising a first institutional round. What has changed underneath them is deal size. Median seed rounds have kept climbing, and a seed check today behaves more like the Series A checks these same firms were writing three years ago.
Medium Raises: Top VC Firms Leading $10M-$50M Growth
General Atlantic climbed from $84 billion in assets under management to more than $100 billion, and its ranking on Private Equity International’s PEI 300 moved from 13th to 8th in twelve months, one of the sharpest jumps on this list.
Tiger Global, last year’s clean $40 billion figure, is harder to state simply now. Depending on which fund and strategy you count, its numbers range from roughly $40 billion up to $78 billion firm-wide. That is not necessarily decline. It is a firm that stopped being easy to rank against the others in a single figure.
Insight Partners held flat at roughly $90 billion, still tied for the largest pool of capital in venture. NEA kept its position without major movement.
Large and Ultra Raises: Top VC Firms Leading the Mega-Round Era
Andreessen Horowitz more than doubled, from roughly $42 billion in assets under management in 2024 to over $90 billion now, putting it in a dead heat with Insight Partners for the largest fund in venture.
Thrive Capital, known a year ago mainly for leading OpenAI’s and Databricks’ rounds, has grown into a roughly $37 billion firm in its own right after closing a new flagship fund.
General Catalyst did not appear in last year’s top-tier rankings at all. It now sits inside most lists of the five largest venture firms in the world, with assets estimated above $30 billion, the single biggest new entrant on this year’s list.
SoftBank’s Vision Fund remains, on paper, the largest pool of venture capital anywhere, north of $100 billion. It was described a year ago as deploying well below its peak, and nothing in 2026 suggests that has changed. Size and deployment are no longer the same claim.
Where the Biggest Checks Landed
OpenAI alone raised $122 billion in a single round in the first quarter of 2026. Anthropic raised $30.6 billion, xAI raised $20 billion, and Waymo raised $16 billion, all in the same three months. Ten rounds above $2 billion accounted for more than $206 billion of the quarter’s total funding on their own.
Deal count across the whole industry fell 17 percent in 2025 even as total dollars invested rose 47 percent to $469 billion. Mega-rounds surged 77 percent year over year and captured 65 percent of all venture funding. Fewer companies are getting funded. The ones that do are getting funded at a scale that would have looked absurd two years ago.
Geographic Performance: Top VC Firms by Country
The United States pulled in 70 percent of global venture funding in 2025, up from 64 percent the year before. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, US startups took in roughly $267 billion against $26 billion for Europe and $32 billion for Asia. London, Singapore and a handful of Indian cities are still competing for what is left, and the gap has widened rather than closed. A founder outside the US is now raising into a market that controls a smaller share of the world’s venture capital than it did even twelve months ago.
What AUM Doesn’t Show
None of the figures above are the number limited partners check most closely before writing a new commitment. According to Carta’s dataset of more than 2,500 funds, the median fund from the 2021 vintage sits at just 1.02x TVPI and a 1.4 percent net internal rate of return five years in, with next to nothing returned to its investors. A genuinely top-quartile mature fund still clears 2.6x to 3.6x TVPI and 21 to 29 percent net IRR.
Distributions to paid-in capital, the measure of cash sent back to investors rather than a valuation on paper, has been stuck near 14 to 15 percent of net asset value since late 2022. That is the metric LPs weigh most heavily now, more than fund size or the headline valuation of a portfolio.
A firm can top every ranking on this page by AUM and still be one of the funds explaining to its own investors, behind closed doors, why the cash has not shown up yet. In 2025, being a top VC firm mostly meant deploying the most capital into the right AI bets early. In 2026, the firms still called top VC firms in another year will be the ones that can show LPs a return, not just a bigger fund.
Sources
CB Insights via International Banker
