Active Investors Kept Up The Deal Pace In Q3, Even As Funding Fell

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Active Investors Kept Up The Deal Pace In Q3, Even As Funding Fell

October 9, 2026

Image of expanding $100 bill ... increasing money. [Dom Guzman]

Joanna Glasner

Active startup investors largely kept up or increased their dealmaking pace in the third quarter, even as overall venture funding declined with the absence of new record megarounds for AI leaders.

Per 萝莉视频 data, a majority of the most active venture investors in Q3 participated in more deals compared to the prior quarter. This includes many of the usual busiest dealmakers, like , and .

The top lead venture investors also largely stepped up the pace this past quarter, even as the highest-spending among them appeared to put less capital to work. At seed stage, meanwhile, the typical top dealmakers largely held their ranks.

For a more detailed look, below we chart and analyze the most active investor ranks across multiple metrics, including venture dealmakers, high spenders, lead backers and seed funders.

Most active venture investors

We鈥檒l start with the most active investors in post-seed rounds. By this measure, topped the ranks with 45 deals. The famed accelerator typically ranks high because it participates in follow-on rounds for startups it incubates.

Next on the list were Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners and Sequoia Capital. Overall, as charted below, at least 22 investors participated in 10 or more known venture rounds this past quarter.

Busiest lead investors

Among lead investors in venture rounds, Insight, Andreessen and ranked highest with 18, 16 and 12 rounds, respectively.

Another three investors 鈥� , Sequoia and 鈥� had 10 lead deals each in Q3.

Spendiest lead investors

We also attempted to get a sense of which lead investors put the most capital work in Q3. To approximate this, our ranking looks at investors whose lead rounds had the highest aggregate value.1

By this metric, Valor and Atreides tied for the No. 1 slot, with $7.7 billion in led or co-led deals for the quarter. The two had some overlap, with at least listing both firms as lead investors. This included 鈥檚 $3.9 billion Series F and 鈥檚 $375 million Series C.

Next in the ranking were Andreessen Horowitz and , with $6.5 billion and $6.3 billion in led or co-led Q3 deals. Andreessen鈥檚 tally largely stemmed from a $2 billion round for and a $1.7 billion financing for .聽 Nvidia鈥檚 standout deal was a $5 billion round for .

Seed investors

Seed investors also kept busy in Q3. Among them, the busiest by far was Y Combinator, which participated in at least 221 known seed rounds this past quarter, per 萝莉视频 data.

also ranked high, with 31 reported seed rounds, followed by and with 24 and 23 reported deals, respectively.

Overall, another busy, AI-driven quarter

Overall, our active investor rankings paint the picture of another busy quarter for startup funding, with AI driving the bulk of dealmaking.

Mostly, it鈥檚 familiar names topping our various rankings. However, we are seeing a few firms significantly scaling up their investments, with Atreides and Valor in particular stepping up their game of late.

萝莉视频