Top VCs Investing in AI: 15 AI Venture Capital Firms (2026)

You're raising for an AI startup, and every investor says they love AI. That's the problem. VCs are riding the AI startup wave, but a few giant rounds take much of the money. So the hard part isn't finding AI investors. It's finding the ones that back your stage and your kind of AI. Below are the top VCs investing in AI in 2026, with their newest funds and deals.

By PitchBook's count of generative AI deals, the most active are Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst. Khosla Ventures and Lightspeed also make its top ten. Thrive, Menlo and Accel lead some of the biggest AI rounds. For early rounds, look at AI specialists like Conviction, Radical Ventures and Air Street Capital.

How do the top AI venture capital firms compare?

They fall into three groups. Big multi-stage firms like Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed back AI from seed to giant late rounds. Growth firms like Thrive write some of the biggest cheques. AI specialists like Conviction and Air Street focus on early rounds. Most of them publish fund sizes, but few publish cheque sizes.

How we picked them: we started with PitchBook's ranking of the most active generative AI investors. We kept firms that raised a fund or led an AI round since the start of 2025. Then we added AI-focused VC funds that lead early rounds. We checked every firm's own pages in October 2026.

More AI investors from Waveup Copilot, our free investor database. Open any card for the fund's full profile.

Sequoia Capital

Sequoia has done more generative AI deals than any other VC, by PitchBook's count. It led Harvey's Series D and backs OpenAI. Its new seed and Series A funds show it still writes early cheques.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)

Andreessen Horowitz came second on PitchBook's count, just four deals behind Sequoia. Its January 2026 raise includes separate Apps and Infrastructure funds. It led Thinking Machines Lab's seed round in 2025.

General Catalyst

General Catalyst climbed to fourth on PitchBook's list. It backs labs like Anthropic, Mistral and Thinking Machines. It also co-led a $1.1B round for River AI, a startup just two months old.

Khosla Ventures

Khosla was one of OpenAI's first VC backers. It favours AI in hard fields: health care, robotics and self-driving trucks. It led General Intuition's latest round, which uses video games to train AI agents.

Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed has bet big on Anthropic and co-led its 2025 mega-round. It says it has backed 165 AI-native companies, including Mistral and Glean.

Thrive Capital

Thrive makes big, repeat bets. It first backed OpenAI in 2023 and has added more since, PitchBook reports. It also led a big round for Cursor, the AI code editor.

Menlo Ventures

Menlo led Anthropic's Series D and has invested in every round since. It also led Lovable's Series C in August 2026. With Anthropic, it runs the Anthology Fund for pre-seed to Series A startups.

Accel

Accel wants to be a company's first partner, and it now follows winners to late stage. It co-led Cursor's Series D and joined Thinking Machines Lab's seed round. Its newest fund is for late-stage deals.

Insight Partners

Insight is a big software investor that also backs AI early. It says it invests from seed and leads Series A rounds. In February 2026 it led Pasito's Series A. Pasito builds an AI workspace for employee benefits.

Antler

Antler backs founders from inception, through its residency, up to Series A. It calls itself the most active AI investor of 2025 by number of rounds, citing Dealroom. It was an early backer of Lovable.

SignalFire

SignalFire is a seed specialist that uses its own AI tools to track talent. Its latest fund is for applied AI. It led Siro's Series B, an AI coaching tool for sales reps.

Conviction

Conviction is Sarah Guo's fund for AI-native software. It says it often writes a company's first cheque. Its portfolio includes Harvey, Cognition, Mistral and Sierra, and it raised a second fund in early 2025.

Radical Ventures

Radical is a Toronto fund that mainly backs companies built on AI. Its portfolio includes Cohere, Waabi and Xanadu. Its new early-stage AI fund closed in October 2025.

AI Fund

AI Fund is Andrew Ng's venture studio in Mountain View. It co-founds AI startups with entrepreneurs, from idea to funded company. It closed its second fund in May 2025. Our list of venture studios has more like it.

Air Street Capital

Air Street is a solo fund run by Nathan Benaich, who also publishes the State of AI report. It leads early rounds in Europe and North America, and it closed its third fund in March 2026. For more UK funds, see our list of AI investors in the UK.

Which Big Tech companies invest in AI startups?

NVIDIA invests more often than most VC firms. Crunchbase counted it in 59 startup rounds by mid-August 2026, more than in all of 2025. Google invests through GV, and Microsoft and Salesforce through their own venture funds. OpenAI has its own startup fund. And Anthropic partners with Menlo on the Anthology Fund.

Corporate money can open doors to chips, cloud credits and customers. But a corporate investor may want rights that worry later VCs, like a first look if you sell. Our guide to corporate venture capital vs venture capital explains the trade-offs.

How much venture money goes to AI in 2026?

Most of it. AI startups took 64% of global venture funding from July to September 2026, by Crunchbase's count. That's down from 80% in the first quarter, but up from about half in 2025. And a few giant rounds for labs like OpenAI and Anthropic take a big part of it.

The money is lopsided. Crunchbase found that four companies took 65% of all venture funding in the first quarter of 2026. They were OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Waymo. PitchBook counts more AI funding in that quarter than in all of 2025. So the AI share shows where the giant cheques went. It says little about how easy your seed round will be.

What do AI investors check before they invest?

In our work, AI investors check five things early. What's your gross margin after model costs? Do compute costs fall as you grow? Do you own data rivals can't copy? How much do you depend on one model provider? And do users stay? Growth gets you the meeting. A clear path to healthy margins gets you the term sheet.

Say you sell an AI sales assistant for $50 a seat each month. Model calls and cloud cost you $30 a seat. That's a 40% gross margin. Bessemer's steadier AI growers average about 60%. So investors will ask how you close the gap. Options include a cheaper model for simple tasks, caching, or prices that rise with usage.

They'll also ask what happens if your model provider ships your feature. Bessemer warns that products too close to the core models risk being called thin wrappers. Your answer is what you own: customer data, integrations and a workflow people won't leave. For a profitable enterprise AI company, we put that moat in one table: what the product does that generic AI assistants can't. Our guide to building a competitive moat shows how to make that case.

Infrastructure investors want different proof. Waveup prepared the investor materials for a sovereign AI infrastructure company's $5M seed, $15M Series A and $100M debt facility. Data centre investors don't buy the AI story. They check time to power, signed demand, the economics of each site and a capital structure that fits the asset. Read the case.

How do you pitch the best VC firms for your AI startup?

Start with fit. Pick firms whose stage, cheque size and AI focus match your round, and check they don't back a rival. Then show what they'll test: a margin plan, data you own and users who stay. Get in through a founder they backed. Book first meetings close together, so offers land at the same time.

1. Match stage and cheque — a $3M seed won't fit a growth fund. Filter more funds in Waveup Copilot, our free investor database.
2. Check for rivals — read the portfolio page. Many firms won't back two companies chasing the same buyers.
3. Show the margin path — a financial model with cost per customer, today and at scale, answers it before they ask.
4. Get a referral — a founder they backed or a former colleague beats a cold email. Our investor outreach guide shows how.
5. Run a tight process — book first meetings within two or three weeks. Our AI fundraising guide covers the rest.

Since 2014, Waveup has built the decks and models behind $3B+ raised for 600+ startups. Our core focus is Series A and B. Our fundraising team builds the investment case AI investors test: the deck, the model and a list of funds that fit. Our clients have raised from a16z, Sequoia, Insight Partners, Salesforce Ventures and Antler.