Which investors have the most billion-dollar companies in their portfolios? And who got into those startups early?

There are 74 private US companies valued at a billion dollars or more, according to our real-time unicorn tracker. We used CB Insights data to analyze which investors have backed the most unicorns and are in the best position to capitalize should these companies manage to exit for the valuations they’re receiving in private markets.

Sequoia Capital continues to retain its spot as the top investor in unicorns, with 17 currently in their portfolio including InstacartAirBnB, and Square. Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz were tied for second place with 15 unicorn companies each. Some other interesting points:

  • 4 of the top 8 investors in unicorns are large, typically public market investors (mutual fund, bulge-bracket investment banks, etc.). Goldman, Fidelity Investments, Wellington Management, and T. Rowe Price all have 12 or more US unicorns in their portfolios.
  • There are now 43 institutional investors with at least 5 US unicorns in their portfolio, compared to 14 when we did this analysis in early March.

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Skilled investors are able to get into these valuable companies early, so we evaluated which firms were able to get into the most unicorns at the early stages (Seed and Series A).

When we last did this analysis in March 2014, Sequoia was the undisputed top early-stage investor in unicorns. But since then SV Angel has jumped up and tied with them, with both firms having 9 early stage unicorn investments. Benchmark followed after them with 7 early-stage investments into some of the most valuable unicorns (four months ago they only had 3).

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The proportion of unicorn investments that were early-stage offers another way to gauge the firms’ relative investment prowess. Below is a full list of the top investors in unicorn companies as well as the number of those unicorns which they invested in at the early stages. Some of the best investors on this list are SV Angel (12 unicorns with 9 investments at the early stage), Y-Combinator (6 unicorns and 6 early-stage investments in unicorns), as well as First Round Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Lowercase Capital.

 

Top VC Investors in the Unicorn Club (7/21/15)

Investor Number of Unicorns Early Stage Investments in Unicorns
Sequoia Capital 17 9
Investor Number of Unicorns Early Stage Investments in Unicorns
Andreessen Horowitz 15 5
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers 15 0
T. Rowe Price 14 0
Wellington Management 13 0
Fidelity Investments 13 0
SV Angel 12 9
Goldman Sachs 12 0
Accel Partners 11 6
Founders Fund 11 4
Tiger Global Management 11 1
New Enterprise Associates 11 1
Khosla Ventures 10 6
Greylock Partners 10 4
Benchmark Capital 9 7
Institutional Venture Partners 9 1
Meritech Capital Partners 8 0
Salesforce Ventures 8 0
General Catalyst Partners 7 2
Insight Venture Partners 7 1
Google Ventures 7 0
Iconiq Capital 7 0
Y Combinator 6 6
Lowercase Capital 6 5
Venrock 6 2
GGV Capital 6 1
Draper Fisher Jurvetson 6 1
Morgan Stanley 6 0
First Round Capital 5 5
Lightspeed Venture Partners 5 3
Bessemer Venture Partners 5 2
DAG Ventures 5 1
Valiant Capital Partners 5 0
JPMorgan Chase & Co. 5 0
TPG Growth 5 0
Redpoint Ventures 5 0
Industry Ventures 5 0
Digital Sky Technologies 5 0
Bezos Expeditions 5 0
Intel Capital 5 0
BlackRock 5 0
Alibaba Group 5 0
Comcast Ventures 5 0

 

Want more information on unicorns? Check out our venture capital database below.