The most active global startup investors largely got busier in the second quarter of 2025, backing and leading more rounds and putting larger sums of capital into deals.

Overall, nine of the 10 most active venture investors did more deals in Q2 than in Q1, per Crunchbase data. Ditto for 80% of the top 10 lead investors by deal count, as well as the vast majority of the spendiest investors in Q2.

However, while many big-name firms upped their investment activity, we did see one Q1 record-setter step back. SoftBank, which backed OpenAI’s unprecedented $40 billion financing in late March, did not place in any of our most-active or highest-spending investor rankings for Q2.

Below, we drill into the active investor rankings in more detail, looking at top venture investors, biggest spenders and busiest seed backers.

Lead venture investors

We’ll start with lead investors, as this provides a snapshot of busy dealmakers who also put a lot of capital to work in each round.

For Q2, Accel and General Catalyst  stood out as the most active by this metric, with 20 and 16 lead rounds, respectively.

Many of those deals were jumbo-sized investments as well. Accel, for example, led five rounds of $100 million more, including a $500 million financing for generative AI unicorn Perplexity and a $260 million Series C for spacetech startup True Anomaly.

General Catalyst also kept busy, leading eight deals of $100 million and up. Its biggest investment was a $1 billion financing for AI writing and productivity assistant Grammarly.

The rest of the top five — Insight Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners — weren’t too far behind. Below, we ranked them in a list of the 21 most-active lead investors for the quarter.

Spendiest investors

While Accel and General Catalyst may have led the most deals, they didn’t spend the most money in Q2.

That title goes to Meta for a single deal: Its $14.3 billion investment for Scale AI as part of a strategic and financial deal that also had founder Alexandr Wang join the social media giant.

After Meta, the next-heaviest spenders were Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz. For Founders, the ranking was mostly due to the $2.5 billion round it led for defense tech unicorn Anduril. For Andreessen, the biggest round was the $2 billion seed financing it led for Thinking Machines Lab.

After them came Greenoaks, which led Safe Superintelligence’s $2 billion round in April.

Busiest venture dealmakers

While some venture investors concentrate their bets on a few rounds, others spread their money across a high number of deals.

In this latter group, a perennial standout is Y Combinator. Though best known as a seed accelerator, it also participates in later rounds for companies it incubated, usually as a non-lead investor.

That translates into a lot of deals. For Q2, Y Combinator participated in 45 post-seed financings, the most of any investor. The lineup included large rounds for high-profile companies including HR platform Rippling and AI robotics startup Gecko Robotics.

After Y Combinator, the second-most-active by deal count was General Catalyst, which participated in 38 deals as a lead or non-lead investor in Q2. In third place was Accel, with 31 deals, followed by Khosla Ventures, with 30.

Below, we ranked the 22 most-active post-seed investors of the quarter by deal count.

Seed investors

Seed-stage investors also kept busy in Q2, with familiar names leading the way.

Y Combinator landed the top slot, with 50 reported seed investments. Next was Antler, with 33 seed deals.

For a broader perspective, below we ranked the 18 most-active global seed dealmakers, based on reported rounds.

It should be noted that seed investment reporting differs from other stages and this can affect deal counts. For one, accelerators commonly report investments in batches, causing high deal-count fluctuation from quarter to quarter. Additionally, seed-stage companies and backers are often stealthy and are known to delay reporting new financings.

Overall: Busy times, big checks

As we review our rankings of the most-active and highest-spending investors for the quarter, the broad takeaway looks pretty clear. Overall, these are bullish times for startup backers, evidenced by high deal counts as well as big-ticket individual rounds.

Looking ahead, we’ll be curious to see if a pickup in IPO activity translates into more deals and large pre-IPO rounds from growth investors. Given that the active investor list is dominated by U.S.-focused firms, it’ll also be interesting to see more international representation in the ranks.

Related reading:

Illustration: Dom Guzman

After 14 years of developing inside of semiconductor giant Intel, RealSense is striking out on its own.

RealSense sells cameras that use stereoscopic imaging, a process that combines two images of the same object from different angles to create depth, enhanced with infrared light. This technology helps machines like robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles have a better perception of the physical world around them. The tech is also used for facial authentication.

“The common denominator of all of them is they live in the real, physical world,” CEO Nadav Orbach told TechCrunch. “They need to understand the surroundings in 3D and based on that, take and plan actions right in the world. And for that, they need a real-time, high-accuracy ability to understand the surrounding in 3D. And that’s what we do best.”

Orbach joined Intel back in 2006 as a CPU architect in Israel. He started working on vision technology in 2011 before becoming the general manager of incubation and disruptive innovation in 2022 and moving to San Francisco last year.

“We knew and understood that 3D perception was going to be big,” Orbach said about the early days of RealSense. “To be honest, we weren’t quite sure in which domain. We tried that across different market segments and different applications, all the way from gesture recognition with computers, phones, until we really found our sweet spot over the years, mostly in robotics.”

The company works with numerous industries outside of robotics, too. Orbach said they’ve heard from fish farms looking to track the volume inside their pens. Chipotle has also used RealSense cameras, in a partnership with AI restaurant software company PreciTaste, to track when food containers are low.

RealSense has more than 3,000 customers and has seen a surge in new interest over the last three to four years as AI has improved. With that, the applications for robotics, especially, have scaled.

The company realized it may have a better chance keeping up with demand — and scaling itself — if it spun out of Intel and raised its own capital, Orbach said.

The spinout plans hatched last year and got the approval from former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. The company is now independent and raised a $50 million Series A funding round from Intel Capital and other strategic investors to get started on its own.

“For me, it was exciting, to be honest,” Orbach said. “I’m a veteran executive in the company, but it’s first time that I’m, you know, I was on the other side of the table. It was a very humbling experience for me as a first-time CEO to go and and raise money.”

RealSense will put the capital toward building out its go-to-market team and making improvements to its technology. The company is particularly focused on improving the tech so it can help improve safety during humans and robot interactions and to improve access control.

“There is a learning curve of, you know, stepping out,” Orbach said. “I’m extremely excited about that. I’m fortunate to have a very strong team with a lot of people in my team that that have entrepreneurial experience. I feel that with my background, together with with some strong teammates, I think we have the right mix for success. And for me, it’s a dream coming true.”