- Finding the perfect seed investor has always been tough for tech founders, but has gotten tougher.
- There are thousands of firms out there, each with their own specialties and varied track records.
- We’ve narrowed it down to the best 75 based on data from Crunchbase and the firms themselves.
Seed investing, the first checks written to support fledgling startups, is full of risk and reward. Those rewards have spawned thousands of seed funds. But getting those funds to actually invest has become tougher for founders in 2023, investment-tracking database Crunchbase reported.
Given that, Insider created the Seed 75 list as a new member to our Seed 100 and Seed 30 lists of the best individual seed investors.
We began with a list of thousands of highly active seed investors supplied by Crunchbase. We narrowed it down to the top 150 based on volume of funding activity. We then asked each firm to verify their number of seed investments in the last five years, from 2018 through the end of Q1, 2023, and the number of follow-on rounds those companies achieved during that time. Some companies verified the Crunchbase data, some didn’t respond but most others supplied us with updated data.
With that data, we created a weighted scale: two points for each investment made, three for each follow-on round and four for each percentage point those follow-on rounds represented of their five-year investment numbers. This scale weights most heavily for activity: those cutting the most checks floated to the top of our ranking. But the ranking was also heavily influenced by how well their five-year portfolio companies did when raising additional capital as needed. What follows is the top 75 seed firms who scored at the top of our weighted scale.
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