Preqin has named its top 100 Venture Capital firms, ordered by the amount of capital each firm has raised in the last 10 years.
The top 10, with their headquarters city, are as follows:
- Tiger Global Management, New York
- New Enterprise Associates, Menlo Park
- Sequoia Capital, Menlo Park
- DST Global, Central, Hong Kong
- Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Park
- Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Park
- Accel Partners, Palo Alto
- IDG Capital, Beijing, China
- Index Venture, London, UK
- Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Park.
It probably isn’t surprising to many readers of AAA that Menlo Park firms make up half of the top 10. Menlo Park is as close as one can come to having “Silicon Valley” in one’s mailing address. That city, and nearby Palo Alto, home of Accel, epitomize the go-digital-and-get-rich self-image of much of today’s VC world.
Heck, Palo Alto is the site of the garage where William Hewlett and David Packard sweated over their audio oscillator in the 1930s.
In broader (country-and-continent) terms, too, the above list is fairly representative of the whole top 100. The United States gives the list seven names of the top 10, and the US is likewise the home of 68 of the top 100.
What may be surprising to some, those who are aware of Greater China’s growing importance in this space, is that Greater China is home to ‘only’ 22 of the top 100. These, though, are 22 that count! As one can see from above, two of those 22 are in the top 10. Also, Shanghai DOBE Cultural and Creative Industry Development is 11 and Nanjing Zijin Investment is 17.
The United Kingdom remains the hub of VC activity in Europe, so the presence of Index Venture near the top of the list is fitting.
Some Big Numbers
The aggregate capital raised by the top 100 venture capital GP’s in the ten years up to April 2017 is: $224 billion.
The #1 firm on the list, Tiger, the creation of Julian Robertson disciple Charles Coleman III, has raised close to $12 billion (specifically, $11.968 billion) by its lonesome. It has been a moving force in the world of social media, with investments in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Zynga.
Tiger’s AUM number leaves a considerable gap between Tiger and number 2, New Enterprise, at $8.230 billion.Dividing the aggregate up by region: $162 billion has been raised by North American GPs; $48 billion by those of Greater China (another $2.5 billion by GPs in the rest of the Far East); $9.3 billion by Western Europe. That leaves only $2.2 billion unaccounted for, and about half of that is attributed to Nexus Venture Partners of Mumbai, India (thus of “South Asia” in the geographical categories employed here).
Preqin estimates that $76 billion of the $224 total consists of “dry powder.”
Who Are The Investors?
Along with the GP list, Preqin has also given the world an LP list, so we can know who the big investors are. The first ten of these are as follows:
- European Investment Fund, Luxembourg
- University of Michigan Endowment, Ann Arbor, US
- Greenspring Associates, Owings Mills, US
- California Public Employees’ Retirement System, Sacramento, US
- Adams Street Partners, Chicago, US
- San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System, San Francisco, US
- University of Texas Investment Management Company, Austin, US
- Hewlett Packard Pension Fund, Plano, US
- Liberty Mutual Retirement Benefit Plan, Boston, US
- HarbourVest Partners, Boston, US.
The list is ordered by the number of known fund commitments over the last ten years – again, up to April 2017.
North American Tilt
As Preqin observes, the LP list gives an even more marked North American tilt to the industry than does the GP list. Nine of the top ten are US based entities. The US is home to 77 of those in the top 100, Canada another three.
All three of the three Canadian LPs on the list are located in Montreal. They are (in order of rank: BDC Venture Capital; Fonds de Solidarité des Travailleurs du Québec; and Teralys Capital.