For the first quarter of this year, and ranked at the top of our list of the most active and spendiest lead venture investors. However, their leading roles come at a time when the cast of deep-pocketed startup backers is shrinking some.

In particular, the investors who used to reliably top the list — and — are taking a breather. The two didn’t even crack the Top 20 in Q1.

It’s the latest indication that times have changed in the VC world. We’re seeing muted activity at seed and early stage, and fewer big late-stage rounds amid a lackluster IPO market.

Even so, deal flow hasn’t dried up. While many of the busiest investors in Q1 are mostly backing fewer rounds than they did a year ago, several have actually picked up the pace. Below, we look at the 10 most active lead or co-lead venture investors in Q1:

Notably, about half the active lead investors have slowed dealmaking compared to bubblier days a year ago. This includes Andreessen, and .

Others are actually leading more deals than they did a year ago. This group includes General Catalyst, and .

Table of Contents

• Spendiest investors
• Most active seed investors
• Down, but not out
• Further reading

Spendiest investors

Next, we tallied up the largest rounds and their lead backers to get a sense 1 of which investors put the most capital to work in the first quarter.

As it turns out, our findings were highly skewed because there were two unusual and enormous financings that dwarfed every other Q1 deal in size. These were the reported $10 billion investment into — largely from — and a $6.5 billion round for payments giant .

All of the seven top investors in our list of those who led or co-led the most capital-intensive batch of financings last quarter, shown below, were Microsoft or Stripe backers:

Co-lead investors for the $6.5 billion Stripe financing announced in March include Andreessen, General Catalyst, , , and . Microsoft, meanwhile, is the only listed investor for OpenAI’s mega-financing.

As you can see from the chart above, there’s a huge gap between the Microsoft and Stripe backers and everyone else. The next-highest names on the priciest lead round list — and — led rounds valued in aggregate at less than a fifth that of the Stripe backers.

Most active seed investors

While we saw some dramatic shifts in the ranks of most active and highest-spending venture investors, seed stage was a bit more stable.

Last year’s two most prolific seed investors — and — still topped the list in Q1. We also saw mostly familiar names round out the ranks of the top eight most active seed-stage investors, shown below:

It’s not surprising to see seed investors staying active even as overall funding contracts. For investors at this stage, the state of the IPO market or public tech valuations aren’t an immediate concern, as their portfolio companies are likely a long way from exit.

Still, a majority of the most active seed investors for Q1 reported lower deal counts compared to a year ago. The pullback is part of a broader reduction in global seed-stage investment, which fell 44% year over year in Q1, per Crunchbase data.

Down, but not out

The broad takeaway from our latest most active investor data dive is that overall venture and seed firms are putting less capital to work in fewer deals.

It’s also probably prudent not to put an overly optimistic spin on the two giant rounds of the quarter for Stripe and OpenAI. The Stripe investment, after all, was at a down valuation, and OpenAI, a capped profit company governed by a nonprofit, was not a traditional venture round.

The more measured take on Q1 is that this looks like a continued pullback, but not a collapse. Big rounds are still closing, and while some big names have dropped from the ranks of high-spending investors, other startup backers are keeping active.

Further reading

• Global VC Funding Falls Dramatically Across All Stages In Rocky Q1, Despite Massive OpenAI And Stripe Deals
• North American Startup Funding Weakens Further In Q1
• Asia Venture Funding Drops 57% Year Over Year, With Late Stage Posting Largest Decline

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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, , , , and others also participated in the round. The two-year-old company raised a $2 million seed led by Obvious Ventures in 2017. NFX and Precursor Ventures put money in its seed round as well as the most recent funding event.

came up with the idea for Incredible Health after hearing repeated complaints from friends and family members who were doctors and surgeons about understaffing, “and not having enough health care workers, especially nurses, to take care of patients.”

The trained physician and co-founder (an MIT alum who comes from a family of nurses) set about creating a marketplace for hospitals and health systems to connect to qualified nurses looking for work. Abuzeid cites indicating that by 2024, the U.S. is poised to have a shortage of one million nurses.

The marketplace launched about 18 months ago in California, where the company says it’s already profitable. It uses “proprietary algorithm-based tech” to match hospitals with nurses for permanent jobs.

“By automating the screening and custom matching process, hospitals and health systems can hire permanent nurses in less than 30 days,” she told Crunchbase News. “This is a process that normally takes 90 days or more with the inefficiencies of traditional hospital hiring practices.”

Today, over 150 hospitals in the state are using Incredible Health, including Stanford Health Care, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, CommonSpirit Health, Tenet and HCA, among others. The startup currently has 34 employees compared to about five a year ago, according to Abuzeid, and will use the new capital to expand nationally and to add other health care workers to its platform.

David Jones, Stanford Health Care’s chief human resources officer, says using Incredible Health has led to the institution “consistently” hiring for permanent roles in under three weeks.

Other investors in the latest round include , founder of , a software engineer career marketplace; , co-founder of (acquired by ); and , founder of (acquired by Monster).

Photo courtesy of Incredible Health

, a defense company founded by ex-Facebook VR executive , is working to be on the border of innovation. Literally.

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The company is working to create a virtual border wall with its surveillance technology for government use – and a16z just invested in it, valuing it at $1 billion post-money, . Anduril did not immediately respond for comment regarding the new, reported financing round.

The Orange, California-based company has to date for its artificial intelligence technology. Investors beyond a16z include , , and .

The latter investor was part of Anduril’s DNA earlier than the company’s formation, quite literally. , which Luckey started in 2012, was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for . The founder was eventually ousted from the social media company that he funded an anti-Hillary Clinton, pro-Trump organization with ties to racism.

But Oculus gave Luckey insight on the commercial aspect of augmented reality and virtual reality, and led Anduril’s Series B. The size of that round was undisclosed.

Anduril states on its website that it “self-funds” all of its development, helping it launch software speedier than if it went through the government-first development process.

But Anduril was not the only late-stage round that a16z was involved with this week.

Samsara

Earlier this week , a company focused on industrial IoT sensors, blending hardware and software together, . The new capital values the four-year-old startup at $6.3 billion, according to .

a16z, which led the company’s and co-led its put money in the new round. and led Samsara’s newest round, which included more capital from a16z and .

The firm’s new $6.3 billion valuation is sharply higher than its preceding $3.6 billion rally. In less than a year, therefore, Samsara managed to grow its value by 75 percent. Such sharp rallies in value among high-growth private companies are not rare in 2019, but to see a company as highly-valued as Samsara add $2.7 billion to its worth in ten months is notable.

Also this quarter, a16z has invested in , the , , FlyHomes, Singularity 6, Hipcamp, Freenome, and Substack, among others. The investor currently participates in about 20 known investments per quarter.

Finally

To close, it seems that the unicorn era of booming valuations with big checks to match is still on a spree. And a diverse one at that.

Illustration Credit:

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, the founding partner of the fund, told Crunchbase News that it took two weeks for her to raise the entire fund, thanks to her personal network.

Placing Bets

Kimmel’s first exposure to SaaS came when she was head of social media at Expedia starting in .

“I started out by building internal tools, and saw large inefficiencies inside of large companies,” she said. From there she went to , founded , a biannual workshop for techies, and is now jumping into this first time role as an institutional investor.

About 40 percent of the new fund’s deals will come from , according to Work Life Ventures’ pitch deck. It plans to deploy the capital over 30 investments in 24 months. While she said the fund will also do Series A rounds from time to time, the check size will be around $150,000.

“People will pay out of pocket for [an email optimization startup], so I feel like there was definitely an opportunity to reimagine how is the workplace changing how software is used,” she said. Kimmel pointed out that while the last “tech cycle” may have been about , a newsletter startup for ecommerce businesses, now we’re in the world of , another newsletter startup which lets the average consumer charge readers for subscriptions. Substack recently raised $15.3 million in a financing round for its digital marketplace, in a round led by a16z.

Beyond work tools and collaboration services, Kimmel said she is interested in startups that use software to find “new ways for everyday people to make money.” Companies are no longer just creating a software layer. They’re adding a monetization layer on top of it. And that’s a focus of Kimmel’s new fund.

She pointed to , a startup she invested in that allows anyone to rent out their parking space, as an example.

Deal Flow

Her deep ties to the SaaS community has already let her into some high profile deals. For example, is an investor in , a hyped YC-backed startup that raised a $7.5 million Seed round, which we reported on previously.

“My conversation with Tandem went deep very quickly because I had previously looked at competitors in a similar space, and knew other products in the space operating in stealth,” Kimmel said on the phone.

Additional investments from the fund include another Y Combinator startup, , which focuses on candidate sourcing, and , which lets users “jump to anything in the cloud without digging through tabs or searching multiple systems,” according to its website.

Kimmel’s jumping into a market that has a high saturation of startups all claiming optimization. Her untraditional transition from operator to venture capitalists may or may not be what it takes to differentiate her from the equally high saturation of venture capitalists looking to bet big on the “next Superhuman.”

Illustration:

, which helps brands see if ‘offline experiences’ lead to real sales, has raised a $9.2 million Series A round led by (a16z). Additionally, David Ulevitch of a16z will take a board seat as part of the transaction.

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San Francisco-based AnyRoad charges a subscription fee for access to its platform which helps track metrics like percentage of users that become loyal to a brand after an “offline” experience. In other words, the company can measure how many customers buy a product after being exposed to said product through a free experience.

Think complimentary wine tastings, or luxury driving experiences. A politician could even use AnyRoad data tracking to see the return of investment at political rallies and events, , the co-founder and CEO AnyRoad told me.

The service can also compare conversation rates against hundreds of other brands in similar industries to help their customers get a better understanding of their competitiveness.

“There’s a huge global shift into an experience economy, and every brand that’s not going to be dead in five years is embracing experiential marketing as a form of engagement,” Yaffe told Crunchbase News.

The company compares itself to the Salesforce of the experience economy, and has 400 customers across the United States, Europe and Asia.

Ulevitch of a16z’s wrote about his turn with the offline “experience economy” first hand with Audi. He attended an Audi Driving Experience day with no plans to buy a car, but six months later when he was in the market, he leased one. Offline experiences, he wrote, have been around a while but “are poorly managed and tracked today, without ties to any sort of relationship management system.”

“This leads to a lot of questions for brands as to the efficacy of these experiences. How do you manage communication with your customers before and after experiences? How do you tie purchasing behavior to experiences?” Ulevitch wrote.

AnyRoad’s Yaffe said that in the past, all a business could do to track offline experiences was to trust their intuition, or by “counting smiles.” While AnyRoad competes with customer experience companies like and , Yaffe said no other company is doing exactly what AnyRoad is doing yet.

Given that the company’s revenue has more than tripled in the past year, and its annual contract value (ACVs) have doubled as it went upmarket, it appears to be headed down the right path.

Illustration: .

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It feels like a good time to be a venture capitalist. The stock market is riding high, software companies are trading well, public investors are welcoming any number of unprofitable companies into their portfolios, and there’s plenty of money laying around looking for yield. Still.

Thus the news () that Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has raised several new funds totaling billions of dollars is sufficiently unsurprising that you’ll forget the following figures by lunch. Per :

• A new venture fund, Fund VI, worth $750 million. Fund VI will focus on “early-stage enterprise to consumer and fintech,” per the firm.
• A new late-stage fund dubbed “LSV Fund I” that’s worth $2 billion. Per a16z, this is not a “growth” fund, making bets all along the Series-timescale. Instead, it’s “about late-stage venture.” That’s clear enough.

The two funds, worth $2.75 billion in total, are worth just under 30 percent of all the funds that the venture-capital-ish () company has raised, .

Here’s where the two new funds fit in, looking at known a16z venture rounds:

So, the new growth vehicle is the largest a16z fund to date. It joins the recently announced Mary Meeker vehicle which also tips the scales north of $1 billion. And of course, there may be another Vision Fund brewing. What that means is that a16z now has a powerhouse of capital at its disposal. It just isn’t the only firm that is so-armed.

I am actually surprised that there aren’t more Cold War jokes made about the Unicorn Era venture scene. After all the new Meeker effort, Bond, raised more money than she had ever had to work with at Kleiner. One up’d.

Illustration: .

The capital event was led by Martin Casado at who has joined RapidAPI’s board of directors. Participating investors in the round include , Green Bay Capital, and , the founder and CEO of Nexmo, which in June 2016.

In prior funding, , also led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company confirms that, between the two rounds, it has raised $12.5 million in venture funding.

In 2017, , a similar API search platform.

Why It Matters

Connectivity continues to be a major through-line in technology startups, perhaps now more than ever. People use applications and platforms to connect to each other; applications connect to a network through layers of software and hardware; and, more often than not, applications connect to other applications, databases, and platforms through application programming interfaces (APIs for short).

There are open APIs for just about everything. They help software developers do more faster by letting them easily integrate outside software functionality into their own work. But one of the problems with having a virtually limitless set of options available is, of course, discoverability and organization (or lack thereof, in this case).

RapidAPI is certainly not the first or only company out there trying to catalog the world’s APIs. For example, , founded in 2005, was an early entrant to the space. It was . Newer, community-contributed efforts like have also cropped up as of late.

But RapidAPI is among the fastest-growing marketplaces for open APIs out there today, with over 8,000 APIs listed and 400 billion API calls made each month, according to a statement from the company.

As more companies look to integrate more data and functionality into their platforms, and as programming increasingly becomes a mainstream skill, the demand for APIs and the sites and services that organize them will only continue to grow.

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