Anthropic is the single highest-scoring AI investment for 20 of the top 100 AI venture capitalists in the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson AI Venture Ranking, Stanford finance professor Ilya Strebulaev posted on X on 30 October. OpenAI is the top AI investment for 12 and xAI for 9.
Together, the three labs anchor 41 of the top 100, the ranking says. By our arithmetic, the other 59 investors spread across 35 companies, and 22 of those companies are the top AI investment for exactly one investor each.
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The key insight: In the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson ranking, Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI are the single highest-scoring AI investment for 41 of the top 100 AI venture capitalists, while 22 of the 38 companies on the list anchor just one investor each by our arithmetic.
The ranking, released on Strebulaev’s Substack on 26 October, scores individual investors only on their investments in US-based AI companies, with a cutoff of 31 August 2026. Strebulaev writes that the team classified 728 US-based VC-backed companies as AI.
For each investor, the ranking identifies the single highest-scoring AI investment. Across the top 100, there are 38 distinct such companies. Databricks follows the three labs with 6, and Anduril Industries and Baseten have 4 each.
The chart attached to the post lists Cursor, Reflection AI and Features & Labels with 3 each, and Cerebras Systems, Applied Intuition, Glean, Safe Superintelligence, Luma AI, Higgsfield and Together AI with 2 each. It shows only companies that are the top investment for at least two investors.
Strebulaev writes that “OpenAI matters much more for individuals than for firms”. It is the top AI investment for 12 of the top 100 investors but for only 4 of the top 100 firms, which by our arithmetic is three times as many.
Top 100 individual AI investors in the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson AI Venture Ranking, grouped by each investor’s single highest-scoring AI investment (cutoff 31 Aug 2026). The 13-company and 22-company groups are our arithmetic from the ranking’s chart. Source: Strebulaev-Jackson Venture Rankings via Ilya Strebulaev.
Who Leads the Individual Ranking
Matthew Murphy of Menlo Ventures tops the AI ranking with 12,108 points, about 1.7 times the score of Guru Chahal of Lightspeed Venture Partners, who is second with 7,017, according to the release. Ben Horowitz and David George of Andreessen Horowitz and Joshua Kushner of Thrive Capital complete the top five.
The release says the top three investors hold 27% of the AI points and the top ten hold 50%. Across the top 100, 73% of all points come from investments made in 2023 or later, while investments made in 2020–2022 contribute 8%.
The top 100 AI investors work at 62 firms, the release says. Andreessen Horowitz employs 11 of them, as our earlier report on Strebulaev’s preview noted, and Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia employ 6 each.
Why the Three Labs Matter Now
Anthropic has filed to go public; our reporting on its S-1 and its risk factors covers what the filing discloses. xAI sits inside SpaceX, whose third-quarter revenue we reported on 20 October. OpenAI’s March 2026 valuation was $852 billion, as we reported.
Our piece on the private-data market from the same day describes a separate poll of people in AI; it does not measure investor returns.
The Structural Read
As we read the ranking, the top individual AI investors are concentrated on a few model labs: Anthropic alone is the top investment for 20 of them, more than OpenAI’s 12.
By our arithmetic, OpenAI is the top investment for three times as many top-100 investors as top-100 firms, 12 against 4, which the release attributes to positions from both 2015–2019 and 2023 onward.
As we read the vintage figures, the scores are recent: the release says 73% of all points come from investments made in 2023 or later.
Ilya Strebulaev on X, 30 October 2026
“Three companies anchor two-fifths of the top 100 AI venture capitalists in the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson AI Venture Ranking”
Three Implications
FOR FOUNDERS RAISING FROM TOP AI INVESTORS The release says the top 100 work at 62 firms, and 45 of those firms have exactly one; the partner matters as much as the firm.
FOR ANTHROPIC’S IPO Twenty of the top 100 AI investors have Anthropic as their highest-scoring AI investment, according to the ranking, as the company prepares to go public.
FOR THE LONG TAIL By our arithmetic, 22 companies are the top AI investment for exactly one top-100 investor each.
The framework puts it this way: “The job of any operator, investor, or builder is to know which layer they are operating inside and which layer the binding constraint is rotating toward next.”
As we read it, the ranking shows where top AI investors’ biggest scores sit today: 41 of the top 100 at three model labs. The framework was published in June 2026 and does not discuss the Strebulaev-Jackson ranking.
What Is Not Established
The ranking scores investors with its own methodology, built on six factors that Strebulaev lists as valuation, dilution, net profit, value add, human-capital decay and the split of credit between firms and individuals. A highest-scoring investment is not a statement of realised returns. The full top 100, with names and scores, is available to paid subscribers of Strebulaev’s Substack; we used the public release, the post and its chart. The 59-investor, 35-company and 22-company figures and the three-times comparison are our arithmetic.
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In the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson ranking, Anthropic is the top AI investment for 20 of the top 100 AI investors, OpenAI for 12 and xAI for 9, so three labs anchor 41 of the 100. The other 59 spread across 35 companies, by our arithmetic.
A note on sourcing. Counts, scores and shares come from the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson AI Venture Ranking of individual investors, as published in Ilya Strebulaev’s public release of 26 October 2026, his post on X of 30 October 2026 and the chart attached to it. Facts on Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI come from our earlier reporting. The 59-investor, 35-company and 22-company figures and the three-times comparison are our arithmetic. We did not contact Strebulaev or the companies.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
