Per @Intralinks' survey series, LPs naming sub-$500M managers as their preferred size went from 28% to 49% in a year, and the share for sub-$100M funds tripled to 18%.
Across four annual @Intralinks LP surveys, the preference for managers >$1B AUM has fallen from 46% to 22%, and the >$5B bucket has fallen from 19% to 5%.
Meanwhile, LP preference for <$100M managers has tripled since last year's survey, to 18%.
Check out the latest survey:
ssctech.com/blog/alternati…
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BREAKING: @grant__gregory is promoted to General Partner at @cantos, continuing to back early-stage founders building in the physical world
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Mega funds fundraising calendar: 26 firms behind the 25 hottest AI companies, 11 already back in market, and a stake in one lined up with 1.8x the odds of getting a new fund done.
which VC raises next?
a few weeks ago @murphcapital mapped who backed the 25 hottest AI companies. our hypothesis was that a stake in OpenAI/Anthropic makes the next fundraise easier, so we tested it.
in our Q3 fundraising data, managers holding at least one of the top 25 (17%) but took $28.8B, or 63% of the $46.0B raised. they also come back bigger: of the 24 managers from our map we could size, 21 raised more than last time, a median of 1.3x.
that could just be scale, since the biggest VCs hold the biggest names, so we widened the set. we used @harmonic_ai and pulled 1,889 venture-backed AI startups and their investors, and kept the 429 US VCs that hold at least 3 of them and filed at least one fund with the SEC in 2023–24.
for each one we compared new funds filed in 2025–26 with 2023–24 (counted funds only, with no SPVs or feeders, and only top-25 stakes bought before 2025):
1/ no top-25 stake: 43% fewer new funds. 4+ stakes: 35% more.
2/ after controlling for portfolio size and prior activity, holding even one of the top 25 nearly doubles the odds of getting a new fund done (1.8x).
3/ stakes bought in 2025 or later, tested separately, made no measurable difference. only the early ones did.
holders also come back faster. among the 429, managers with no stake took a median of 34 months to file their next fund after a 2023–24 raise. with 2–3 stakes it was 23 months, with 4+ it was 20. part of that is size: after controls, holders are 1.3x as likely to come back in any given month, a borderline result.
to time the next raises, we pulled Form D filings back to 2009 for the 26 managers on our map that raise in cycles: 215 raises, with a typical gap of 18 months. 7 closed new funds last quarter (~$18B, 40% of Q3), and 11 more are already back in market. our calls:
> dragoneer files next, likely in January. it raises every 18 months, and Opportunities VII started in July 2025.
> @lightspeedvp follows by spring. its median gap is 27 months, and its last fund started in December 2024.
> @ThriveHoldings is back by mid-2027, and bigger. every fund since 2011 has outgrown the last, up to $10B today. the last gap was 14 months.
> @Accel now raises on rotation: Growth VII in December 2024, Leaders V in December 2025, Accel XVII and Growth VIII in August 2026. next up around August 2027.
> @a16z won’t wait for a full cycle. 7 months after its $15B, it launched a $1.1B AI hardware fund and topped up Growth V with $1.75B. next platform raise around the end of 2027.
> @foundersfund is the wildcard. Growth IV came just 11 months after Growth III. its usual cycle points to late 2028, its latest pace to 2027.
> @benchmark sits at the back of the queue. It raises every 3 years, so the next one lands in mid-2029.
who do you think we got wrong?
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BREAKING: @HadickM and @tomhschmidt promoted to Managing Partners at @dragonfly, backing founders across money, markets and intelligence
We are excited to announce @HadickM and @tomhschmidt have been promoted to Managing Partners, joining @hosseeb and Bo in leading Dragonfly.
The promotions recognize the role both have played in shaping Dragonfly into the firm it is today, and mark the firm’s move to a broader partnership. As co-leaders, Rob and Tom will help carry forward what Dragonfly has always done: backing the founders building the future of money and markets.
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Per @saranormous, seed funds holding on to 'safe' priors and letting pedigree do the diligence end up paying the 30-50% consensus premium for it.
the silliest way to lose a lot of money in 2026 is to hold onto stupid priors for dear life
the second silliest is to make “safe” bets behind prestige vs. first principles evaluation of tech/business. if a company has fancy pedigree but is just losing…don’t fight the tape
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Per @Trace_Cohen, the 927-to-211 drop in EM fund closes may track a format shift vs. a capital exit, with LPs moving into SPVs and syndicates for deal-by-deal control.
Everyone keeps pointing to the collapse in emerging VC managers as evidence that venture fundraising is dying.
But I think we’re missing a big part of the story.
Most smaller emerging managers weren’t raising primarily from pensions and endowments. They were raising from family offices, founders, and wealthy individuals.
And those investors haven’t necessarily stopped investing. Many have simply changed how they invest.
Why commit millions to a 10-year blind-pool fund when you can pick individual deals through SPVs?
Yes, institutional capital has moved upmarket. But I suspect a meaningful amount of the capital that once backed emerging managers has moved into SPVs, direct investments, and syndicates.
The number of funds closing is down dramatically. That doesn’t tell us how much capital has actually left the market versus how much has simply moved outside traditional fund structures.
That’s the data I’d really like to see.
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Institutional LPs read the 'venture is broken' slide as a yellow flag, and the strongest emerging manager decks open with their edge and why founders call them first.
some thoughts I’ve collected from VC/LP dinner season:
1/ LPs are genuinely concerned about how quickly funds are deploying capital and this applies to both large funds in their portfolios and emerging VCs. the only difference is that mega funds have hot logos that allow them to keep vacuuming $$$ from everywhere, while for EMs, every new fundraise is an uphill battle (supported by early markups in the best cases).
2/ many emerging GPs spend a surprising amount of time (and deck slides) trying to “educate LPs” or explain why “venture is broken,” rather than showing why founders would choose them and what their actual edge is. imho, it feels like these decks are designed for retail LPs and more institutional LPs see this as a low-quality signal (sometimes even as manipulative).
3/ there’s a growing number of funds moving away from solely pre-seed/seed strategies, mixing them with other instruments like growth secondaries or liquid assets (crypto, public equities, etc.) to provide better liquidity. I’m sure there’s a market for these strategies, but most LPs with EM mandates are fine with a clear secondaries model for VC's portfolio rather than an "overengineered fund strategy" that will fix the industry.
4/ surprisingly, there are plenty of genuinely high-quality GPs who struggle with fundraising (many pursue highly risky, non-consensus strategies driven by media/community/academia leverages) that are difficult to underwrite, while some "vibe-investors" raise pretty large funds. imho, relationships matter more than most people want to admit, and LPs are still largely intolerant of new approaches to founder sourcing and continue to buy "GPs' networks" and pedigrees.
5/ everyone talks about pricing discipline, but once you start reviewing SOIs, you realize how just a few managers actually (a) execute the strategy they pitch, while (b) avoiding investing in "tier-3 companies", and (c) generating some early markups. most GPs still pitch themselves as disciplined investors targeting sub-$10M/$20M valuations, yet somehow end up participating in $60–100M rounds bc "they don’t want to miss out on generational founders.”
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Per @MeghanKReynolds' AGM LP notes, GPs are back in market ahead of schedule, while top funds are set apart by DPI, concentration and portfolio management.
Heard from VC LPs this week. It was our AGM, so I had a ton of convos. Theme is liquidity and differentiation. Some quotes 👇🏻
- “we see a huge difference btw the posture of the GPs who do public + private and those that just do VC/Growth. They are living in different realities.”
- “every GP is raising again faster than we thought, either because they just blew through the money, or because they want a war chest for when the market trips over itself”
- “Across the top GPs, everyone is in market. TVPIs look amazing - differentiation is DPI, concentration and portfolio mgt”
- “We really need the PE guys to start selling some stuff!!”
- “If Anthropic IPO goes great, we are worried it sets the bar too high for everyone else. And if it doesn’t go great, then the bar is even higher…”
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BREAKING: @angeliuuuuu joins @FirstMarkCap as an Investor, leading the firm's growth investing strategy and backing AI founders at the next stage of scale
some personal news: i’ve joined @FirstMarkCap, where I'll be working with exceptional founders and leading the growth investing strategy alongside @abimbhet and @vverawang. FirstMark has backed some of my favorite companies of this cycle: @vercel, @ClickHouseDB, @WeAreLegora, @tryramp, @modal, @ro, @function, to name just a few, and i’m grateful to join a team I've long admired: @rick, @amishjani, @mattturck, @adamn, @DavidWaltcher, and the rest of the FirstMark family!
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Per @JaredSleeper, growth investing now splits into classic proven-model scaling, riding AI inflections and pre-product deals, and each needs a different diligence playbook.
Growth investors today are either dragging right, exponential surfing, or supply-side investing.
Each requires a completely different investing style and craft, and it's important to know which applies.
Dragging right is traditional growth investing. You take a business with an established, predictable, repeatable go-to-market motion based on either consumer acquisition or enterprise sales reps/quotas, and the investors' job is to figure out whether it can scale. "Okay, this company has twenty reps- can it hire another forty? Will the LTV:CAC hold?"
Greatness in evaluating this came down to understanding TAMs/market segments, the breadth of product-market fit, competitive dynamics (often gentle), and how to analyze spreadsheet data/customer calls for signs of potential weaknesses. This was effectively all SaaS investors had to do for the last ten years, and it was glorious. The entire growth investing industry as we know it today was built around this model of funding predictable g-t-m machines with a fairly narrow range of outcomes- and the skillsets that made someone great at it were all about g-t-m logic, TAM analysis, customer work, etc.
Exponential surfing has been the dominant growth investing strategy of the last two years. Consider Anthropic twelve months ago- if you had complete access to the traditional customer data/analytics and spoke to all of the customers, you would find nothing to predict the massive acceleration it saw from December 2025-April 2026. It is literally a completely different game, and most (not all) of the AI companies with material revenue are playing some version of it- not only is their revenue growth hard to predict for investors, it is largely out of their hands as well, dependent on whether the latest models have emergent, high-value, fast-propagating use cases.
Greatness here is still emerging, but as far as I can tell the two ways to have been early to the Anthropic inflection were to be using the products oneself (so you can feel the step-function in capabilities in real time) or obsessively tracking the coincident data (Openrouter, credit card panels, etc.) for signs of sustained acceleration. A strong silicon Valley practitioner whisper-network is perhaps the third way.
What is definitely NOT great is using SaaS terminology metrics (Y/y growth, gross retention, LTV:CAC, ARR, etc.) to characterize this wave of companies. Yes, many of them are "growing faster than SaaS ever did," but also the base rate of them stopping on a dime (or even shrinking) is much higher. It's just a fundamentally different business model, arguably with no clear precedent.
Supply-side investing has risen to prominence in the last 12-18 months. This involves investing in businesses that are pre-product, where the economic value of the product is crystal clear... if it can get built/produced at scale. Neolabs, semis startups, certain very ambitious agent starts, defense tech, robotics startups, etc. all fit this bucket.
Greatness here is about understanding technical challenges and unlocks in granular detail, studying talent flows, gauging which teams have the right combination of research and commercialization chops, etc. The rewards for getting it right are enormous (see: pre-revenue Anthropic investors), but the diligence is, again, completely different.
What is NOT great is talking to dozens of potential customers who all breathlessly assure you that they would love to buy chips 10x more efficient than Vera Rubins at half the price. That is about as useful as reading LOIs from those same customers to buy them by the billions- aka not useful at all. Referring to those LOIs as "CARR" is, well, fantastical. In supply-side growth investing, the demand side is obvious by definition.
Again- there are great investors who will find ways to make money in all of these styles, but it has never been more important to understand which version of investing you're doing and to apply yourself to being excellent at it in a way that fits the game you've chosen to play, not to apply the techniques of yesteryear.
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Per @iamjakestream, capital-efficient growth now reads as 'not venture scale' to a lot of firms, which can open a lane for emerging managers to get in at the right price.
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Per @whoisnnamdi, the bar for Series A has moved from the top 10-15% of Seed startups to the top 3% since the early 2010s, while total Seed value keeps rising on a shrinking pool of startups.
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Models trained on past winners are built for pattern-matching, yet an outlier seed bet needs the opposite.
there's a good chance a big reason for overwhelming VC consensus is that every VC is using the same AI for their due diligence.
hard to be non-consensus if the everyone asks the same models to help evaluate the same startups.
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Every GP feels the power law hardest when years of conviction turn into one company that rewrites the entire track record.
VC is probably the most unfair yet beautiful industry out there.
you can spend 5 years building a fund, struggling to get noticed, and then one portfolio company absolutely explodes and changes your fund’s reputation, your career and your life overnight.
one single investment can change everything.
and the crazy part is everyone has a shot. even the smallest fund nobody has ever heard of.
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Per @arian_ghashghai, the cheapest edge in venture right now is backing founders and sectors before any co-investor signal shows up.
> but if everyone is piling into the same rounds at the same prices
you can also elect to *not* do this:
> invest way earlier. not every founder starts as "legible", and I've backed a number of founders that couldn't raise to save their lives when I invested that ended up becoming "hot" later. cream ultimately rises to the top, and if you find someone great trust your gut, not co-investor "signal"
> invest in sectors/ideas *you* believe to be undervalued. this surface area is bigger than ever btw (consensus ideas in VC are very finite and concentrated atm), and you will face very little competition (i.e. generate alpha) by actively pursuing a sector you think will be big, but isn't big yet.
the problem is both require independent thinking and courage, both of which feel they are at local minima in VC atm
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The 2026 RAISE Select cohort from @raiseconference, compiled into a live map on @cosign by @Trace_Cohen: 101 emerging managers, from AI and cybersecurity to healthcare and energy.
Raise Select Emerging Managers list via @cosign - which would you most want to invest in your startup?
cosign.co/lists/trace_co…
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Seed memos lean on 'cracked team' when a new category has no comps to measure against.
Have this longstanding theory that VCs are attracted to funding a new category until they know “how the magic trick is done”
You always see it in the run up to a sector getting hot. Software. Crypto. AI Wrappers. Defense. Robotics.
Investors use terms like “cracked team” and “relentless energy” because they don’t know enough yet to explain how the startup translates technology into a business.
As soon as the magic is known and they realize it’s all a learnable trick that takes time, effort and capital to perfect, the allure is gone and investors move on. Am I wrong?
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FY2026 endowment returns averaged ~27%, about 2x their ~13% 10-year pace, with 6 of 7 above their long-run average.
A huge year for university endowments that backed VC. Especially, SpaceX. Per @WSJ
“Harvard on Thursday reported a 27.1% gain by its endowment for the fiscal year ended June 30, swelling the endowment’s coffers to almost $68 billion.
Other big winners include the University m, which gained 37.8%—about half of that from SpaceX
Washington University in St. Louis, which gained 37.3%;
and Stanford, which gained 31.7% in its main investment vehicle.”
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