Top angel investors in the U.S.Inspiration for who to raise from when you’re raising your early rounds
👋 Welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. For more: Lennybot | Podcast | Hire your next product leader | My favorite courses | Swag My popular post on fundraising, Raising a seed round 101 by Terrence Rohan and Jack Altman, shared advice about every aspect of early-stage fundraising, except one: who to try to raise money from. The top funds are a known quantity, but the top angel investors are not. And that’s who generally makes up the majority of early-stage funding and cap tables. Especially if you’re trying to bootstrap and take just a few small checks. So I teamed up with the folks at Crunchbase to find out who the most active angel investors in the U.S. are. Crunchbase has the broadest dataset on investment and fundraising I’ve come across, and I’d never seen data on this before, so I was excited to see what we could find. We looked into three questions:
The results are fascinating! Below, you’ll find a list of the top angel investors, and a few of my takeaways from this data. When you go through the list below, you’ll probably be wondering, “But how do I contact them and pitch my idea?” The good news is that I’ve included a link to their contact form when they have one. The bad news is that, as Terrence and Jack pointed out in their post, the best investors look for warm introductions from people they trust, vs. cold emails. My advice is to make a list of folks you find below, and then find someone who knows someone who knows one of these people and try to get a warm introduction. I know that’s annoying, but there’s a reason the best investors operate this way—a warm introduction is an effective filter for the best deals, and it keeps them from getting overwhelmed. As Terrence and Jack also said, though, “if you can’t find a warm intro, craft a good cold email. These don’t convert as well, but there is almost zero downside to sending one.” How this data is sourced: Crunchbase’s proprietary data is based on public fundraising announcements, along with firms and angels who opt in to contributing their cap tables. Since no one has access to the cap tables of every startup (and if they did, they wouldn’t be allowed to share the data), this is the best information anyone has about investors and fundraising. This data isn’t complete or perfect, since many deals are not announced, and not all investors are mentioned in every deal, but it’s the best proxy anyone has. I sanity-checked this list with a handful of prominent investors, and they agree that this group of investors looks right. Treat the numbers below as directional, not as exact figures. The most active angel investors of the past five years
1. Edward Lando and Nadav Ben-Chanoch / Pareto Holdings 🥇I hadn’t heard of Edward or Nadav before seeing this data, which makes this so interesting. Edward and their fund (Pareto Holdings) have invested in more than 1,000 startups, including over 25 unicorns, like Ramp, Mercury, OpenStore, Modern Treasury, Misfits Market, Truebill, and others. Nadav worked with Edward for a number of years and now runs a roofing business. Fascinating! Learn more about Pareto and reach out here. 2. Gokul Rajaram 🥈Gokul is an investor, operator, and also just a super-nice guy. He’s an investor in companies like Airtable, BetterUp, Deel, Digital Ocean, Faire, Figma, Ironclad, Postman, Rubrik, and Vercel. He’s been a senior operator at Google, Facebook, Square, and most recently DoorDash. He’s also on the board of Coinbase, Pinterest, and The Trade Desk and is an excellent tweeter. Stud! His investments are fairly generalist, across B2B, B2C, fintech, infrastructure, and AI. Learn more and reach out to him here. Here’s my podcast episode with Gokul. 3. Elad Gil 🥉Elad, like Gokul, is both a legendary operator and investor. His list of investments is what dreams are made of: Airbnb, Airtable, Anduril, Applied Intuition, Brex, Coinbase, dbt Labs, Deel, Figma, Flexport, Gusto, Instacart, Mistral, Notion, Opendoor, Perplexity, Pinterest, Retool, Rippling, Samsara, Square, and Stripe. He started two successful companies, Mixer Labs (bought by Twitter) and Color Health, and was a VP at Twitter. He also recently incubated a new company, Braintrust, and has an amazing AI podcast with Sarah Guo called No Priors. He’s mostly focused on investing in AI startups these days. Learn more and reach out here. 4. Scott Belsky 🏅Scott is a product person’s product person. He’s the co-founder of Behance, spent five years as Chief Product Officer of Adobe Creative Cloud, and is currently Adobe’s Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President of Design and Emerging Products. He is/was an early advisor and investor to Pinterest, Uber, Flexport, Carta, Airtable, Ramp, Eight Sleep, WorkOS, The Browser Company, and Sweetgreen. He’s also the author of The Messy Middle, Making Ideas Happen, and his newsletter Implications. He seems to gravitate most to consumer products, which is rare these days. Learn more and reach out to him here. Here’s my podcast episode with Scott, and his talk at the Lenny and Friends Summit. 5. Jon OringerJon is the founder of Shutterstock and, interestingly, the co-founder of Pareto Holdings. Those guys are putting up some serious numbers. Jon is an investor in companies like Docker, OpenStore, and Misfits Market. But though he’s still actively investing, he has slowed his pace, with only two known investments last year. 6. Charlie SonghurstCharlie is a prolific British-born angel investor. He was GM and later Head of Corporate Strategy at Microsoft, and since 2013 has invested in more than 500 companies, including unicorns like EasyPost, Formlabs, Convoy, ClassPass, and Rigetti Computing. This conversation with Patrick O’Shaughnessy is the best overview I’ve seen on how Charlie thinks about investing. 7. Naval RavikantNaval is a legendary founder (co-founded AngelList), investor (early investments in Uber, Twitter, Perplexity, Replit, Substack, Opendoor, Vercel, Eight Sleep, and Notion), and also a modern guru. He shares mind-expanding wisdom on tech and life on Twitter, his podcast, and in this fan-created book. His investments are fairly generalist, but he and Scott Belsky are the two most frequent B2C investors on this list. 8. Mark CubanYou’ve no doubt heard of Mark Cuban. He’s a “shark” on the show Shark Tank, part-owns the Dallas Mavericks, owns film studio Magnolia Pictures, is a multi-time founder (famously sold Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion in 1999), and an early investor in Box, OpenSea, Polygon, Yuga Labs, and many others. His investments are all over the place, including web3, DTC, hardware, consumer, B2B SaaS, NBA teams, movie companies. . . He wins for the widest spectrum of investment categories. 9. Lachy GroomLachy (pronounced “locky”) spent seven years at Stripe, where he was Head of Stripe Issuing, then became a super-active investor after leaving Stripe, and while continuing to actively invest, he co-founded Physical Intelligence (which wins for coolest domain name). He’s invested in companies like Figma, Notion, Anduril, Deel, NexHealth, Speak, WorkOS, and Mainframe and invests across B2B SaaS, fintech, infrastructure, healthtech, and AI. You can contact him at lachygroom@gmail.com. 10. Sahin BoydasSahin is the most surprising person on this list to me because (1) I hadn’t heard of him, (2) his list of investments is incredible, and (3) as you’ll see below, he was the #1 most active angel investor in 2024. Sahin is a many-time founder (his company RemoteTeam was acquired by Gusto), is currently on the Corporate Development/Strategy team at Gusto, and has invested in companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Scale, Hugging Face, Postman, Front, WHOOP, Pika, and Eight Sleep. He seems to invest primarily in AI and B2B SaaS but does the occasional consumer product. Learn more and reach out to him here. Here’s a fun visual of the above data over time:  The most active angel investors in 2024
Congrats, Sahin Boydas, on being the most active angel investor in all of 2024 (based on the data we have)🥇 He and Elad Gil are killing it for non-web3 investors 🏆 I’ll skip giving background on folks I’ve already described above, so here are the new faces: 2. Paul TaylorPaul seems to invest almost exclusively in web3, which tells me he probably made a bunch of cash from crypto early on. Nice! He’s a four-time national chess champion, spent four years at BlackRock (doing crypto investing), and has been in crypto since 2011. Here’s a neat interview with him. You can see his list of investments here and find him on X here. 3. DCF GODDCF GOD is also exclusively a web3 investor, and as you do in web3, DCF GOD is an anonymous investor. Delightful. Since I’m not deep into web3, I suspect there’s more to this story, but here’s an interview with him, his X profile, and merch. 5. Anatoly YakovenkoAnatoly is the co-founder of Solana (one of the largest blockchains in the world) and a former engineer at Dropbox, Mesosphere, and Qualcomm. For a web3 founder, he refreshingly invests in other domains, including AI, fintech, cybersecurity, B2B SaaS, and infrastructure. Here’s a recent interview with Anatoly. He seems like a great guy. 7. Nat FriedmanNat is the former CEO of GitHub, a two-time founder, and one of the leading thinkers and investors in AI. He recently helped raise funds for a cool project to use AI to read the long-lost Herculaneum scrolls. He now mostly co-invests with Daniel Gross (who’s also on the list), primarily in AI startups. He’s invested in over 100 startups, including Eleven Labs, Character.ai, Retool, Scale, Vercel, Perplexity, AssemblyAI, Magic.dev, Apollo, and Sentry. He, Elad Gil, and Jeff Dean (below) should probably be on your cap table wish list if you’re starting an AI company. You can reach him at nat@nfdg.com. 8. Roman SmolevskiyI love Roman because he’s the most unlike anyone else on this list. He’s from the construction business and invests in three less sexy (self-described) categories: PropTech, ConTech, and RealTech. To make it more interesting, he’s also an investor in three of Elon Musk’s companies (SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI). Which tells me he’s buddies with Elon. Nice. 9. Jeff DeanJeff is Chief Scientist for Google DeepMind and Google Research. Reading his list of accomplishments will make you feel like you’ve done nothing with your life. I love that he’s angel investing, and anyone would be very lucky to have him on their cap table. 10. Guillermo RauchGuillermo is CEO and co-founder of Vercel, one of the hottest AI startups today (makers of v0). He’s also coming on the podcast early next year! His list of investments includes Perplexity, ElevenLabs, Scale, Honeycomb, Magic, and Runway. Angel investors with the most exits in the past six years...Subscribe to Lenny's Newsletter to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Lenny's Newsletter to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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Top angel investors in the U.S.
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Top angel investors in the U.S.
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