The Midas List 2025

The long freeze for initial public offerings and mergers appears to be thawing and in one corner of the startup market, deals are running white-hot. In 2025, a small cohort of mega startups like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Stripe now command super-sized valuations, rarely seen for private companies. And their earliest backers are now surging ahead in the Midas List, Forbes’ ranking of the world’s top venture capitalists.

Produced in partnership with TrueBridge Capital Partners, the 24th annual Midas List is again topped by Alfred Lin. While the Sequoia investor continues to reap the benefits of early bets on Airbnb and Doordash, which both went public in 2020, a 2021 investment in OpenAI at a $14 billion valuation now adds to his staying power. The ChatGPT-maker is currently valued at $300 billion after raising a $40 billion round in April, a new record for the most money raised by a private startup.

It's not just OpenAI. The surging valuations of startups like SpaceX, Databricks and Anthropic accounts for eight of the 15 newcomers joining this year’s Midas List. Investors Shaun Maguire of Sequoia and Craft Ventures’ David Sacks have broken into the list for the first time largely thanks to bets on Elon Musk’s projects, notably SpaceX, now the world’s most valuable private company after raising earlier this year at $350 billion.

Sacks is joining four members of the so-called PayPal Mafia who are stalwarts on the list. The payments company’s former COO Reid Hoffman and former CEO Peter Thiel now rank second and third, with former colleagues Roelof Botha, top dog at Sequoia who ranks at 13, and Keith Rabois, partner at Khosla Ventures ranked 17.

There’s more than one way to win at venture investing, as two new additions to the Midas List highlight. Lucas Swisher is the co-lead for growth investing at the $55 billion hedge fund Coatue, adding its firepower to major funding rounds for the likes of OpenAI and Spacex, but has also led investments in a new crop of unicorns like data security startup Cyera. That’s poles apart from Midas newcomer Elad Gil, the archetype of a new breed of VCs who are going it alone. Unhindered by partners, an investment committee and all the other baggage of larger funds, San Francisco-based Gil has invested in a string of now billion-dollar companies like defense startup Anduril, AI work tool Glean, and AI search startup Perplexity.

In recent years, the Midas List has seen an increasing number of women join its ranks. But after hitting a record high last year, the number of female investors has dropped back to 10 with a handful of big deals aging out of eligibility. Some funds have pushed to better the current average — only 11% of VC partners are women — but with startups staying private longer, it could take the Midas List more time to reflect what progress has been made.

There are more changes ahead with a new wave of AI startups promising to transform almost every field, and a handful of startups like design platform Figma that look like they might be willing to brave public markets this year. But a handful of investors have shown remarkable staying power on the Midas List: Sequoia's Doug Leone and Roelof Botha; Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha and Mary Meeker of Bond Capital all have uninterrupted Midas runs that stretch over a decade. Leone might have handed his role as Sequoia's managing partner to Botha in 2022 but is now on the cusp of one of his largest-ever exits, if and when Google’s $32 billion takeover of cloud security unicorn Wiz goes ahead.

The Midas List is compiled annually using a data-driven approach that combines public information with submissions from investors at hundreds of VC firms. To be eligible, investors must have backed companies that either went public or were acquired for at least $200 million in the past five years, or that have at least doubled in private valuation to $400 million or more during that time. Deal credit can be shared between up to two investors. Forbes and TrueBridge place greater emphasis on liquid exits than on unrealized gains, and both early-stage investors who generate significant multiples on invested capital and later-stage investors who return substantial cash can earn a spot. The top-ranked Midas investors typically excel in both areas, with a track record spanning a dozen or more qualifying deals. You can learn more about our methodology here.