State of VC Fundraising: Q2 2026
A data-driven look at 137 VC funds that closed between April and June 2026: who raised, how much, and where the money comes from.
Since we launched Murph a year ago, we’ve been tracking every VC fund that either announced a first close or a total close in public, been publishing the list of these funds for free on our website and folding a short version into our monthly newsletter, but we never turned it into an actual report sharing insights and trends.
So we’re launching a new report series where we do what we should have been doing with this data from day one: break it apart by sector, geography, stage, and manager type, and share our perspective about what it actually means for emerging fund managers and allocators.
This is the 1st edition of what we plan to run every quarter.
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Summary Statistics
The picture of Q2 2026 remains as it has been over the last years, with more "concentration inside a contraction": 15 named funds control 69% of all Q2 capital, and Sequoia’s $7B close alone outraised the bottom 76 emerging managers combined. Everything else in this report is just unpacking how that happened, and what it means depending on where you sit, but here are a few key insights if you don’t have time to read the full report:
Emerging funds. 76 debut-or-sophomore funds under $250M raised $4.93B – 13% of the quarter’s capital on 55% of the count. They’re not competing head-on with the mega tier: their sector mix skews hard toward Climate, Defense, and Impact (categories mega-platforms and generalists mostly aren’t chasing) and Europe punches above its overall weight specifically within this cohort (31% of emerging dollars vs. 18% of the whole market).
Mega funds. 15 funds cleared $500M, and almost none of them raised on a generic thesis – Menlo’s $3B is a direct bet on its 2024 Anthropic position (now worth ~$14B), Benchmark’s first-ever growth fund was funded by its Cerebras IPO windfall, 137 Ventures’ $700M is built almost entirely around a ~1% SpaceX stake ahead of its IPO. This is a quarter of funds monetizing specific wins, not raising on vibes.
Verticals breakdown. Crypto/Web3 and Deep Tech are the largest thematic bets, but Crypto’s $3.92B is 92% three checks (a16z crypto, Haun, Framework) which is concentration inside the concentration. Generalist/Multi-stage funds (not really a thematic bet at all) account for 55% of total capital on their own, 86% of which sits in the Mega tier.
Geographic breakdown. The US and Europe combined for 81% of funds and 90% of capital. Europe is closing the gap in deal count (48 funds vs. the US’s 63 – 76% of the US’s pace) but not in dollars (just 25% of the US total, a ~4x gap). Israel skews almost entirely toward AI/defense/deep-tech. We found zero Latin America-headquartered funds this quarter.
Capital concentration. 137 funds closed, $39.26B raised, but the median close ($78M) and the mean ($293M) sit 3.7x apart, because a dozen funds at the very top are doing almost all the work. By count, 55% of funds are Emerging, 34% Middle, 11% Mega/Platform. By dollars, that flips almost entirely: 13% / 18% / 69%. The “middle” is disappearing as a share of the money.
LP analysis. Of the 137 funds, 73 disclosed at least one LP – 262 LP-fund mentions across 235 unique names, but only 11 of those LPs backed more than one fund this quarter. Development finance institutions are the single most common LP type (led by the British Business Bank and European Investment Fund), corporates concentrate in their own sectors, and celebrity money is almost entirely one fund (Animal Capital) in one category (Consumer/Creator).
The rest of this report goes block by block through each of these with the full fund-by-fund detail, the “why now” behind every mega raise, and the complete LP directory.
Emerging Funds
76 funds met our “emerging” bar this quarter – a debut or sophomore vehicle under $250M. The largest of them, Banner VC's $225M Fund I, is bigger than several "Middle" bucket funds above it, which says something about how far the emerging-manager ceiling has stretched even as the average emerging check stays small (median for this cohort: $55M).
Below, we split all of them into 3 size bands and pulled out a handful from each that we found genuinely interesting – not necessarily the biggest checks in their band, just the ones with the sharpest theses or the most unusual backstories.
Small funds (under $50M)
Mid-size funds ($50M–$150M)
Large funds ($150M+)
Small Emerging Funds
Hyperion Ventures ($35M, Fund I). Founded by Harvard classmates Dillon Dunteman and Henry Bellew, Hyperion’s pitch to deeptech founders is depth over speed: every check comes with 100+ pages of technical and strategic research handed directly to the founder. In its first 6 months the firm had already deployed $9M across seven companies, including an early bet on Valar Atomics – now valued at $2B.
Discipulus Ventures ($30M, Fund II). A cohort-residency model built around El Segundo’s hardware-and-defense cluster: promising founders relocate and run through an in-person program embedded in one of the densest deep-tech neighborhoods in the country. LPs include Anduril’s Palmer Luckey and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong. Luckey gave the keynote at Discipulus’s own demo day in April.
Worldbuild ($30M, Fund I). Ex-a16z investment partner Sumeet Singh’s bet that the sharpest pre-seed conviction can’t be outsourced to pattern-matching – Worldbuild leads with published intellectual frameworks instead of chasing recent deal flow. Early portfolio includes SF Compute and Browserbase.
Zero Shot ($20M first close of a $100M target, Fund I). A team of OpenAI alumni, Evan Morikawa (former head of applied engineering for DALL·E, Codex, and ChatGPT) and Andrew Mayne (OpenAI’s first prompt engineer), bets on what they call “the post-AGI world”: robotics, energy, AI security, and biology, on the theory that the market is systematically underpricing exactly these categories.
Mid-Size Emerging Funds
Anti Fund ($100M, Growth I). One of the quarter’s more unusual GP rosters: Geoffrey Woo alongside Jake Paul, Logan Paul, and Steve Han. Despite the influencer-adjacent branding, the portfolio is genuinely sharp – OpenAI, Anduril, Ramp, Cognition, Polymarket, and SpaceX all show up on it.
Daybreak ($100M across two vehicles, Fund II). Rex Woodbury’s step-up from a $33M debut fund – roughly a 3x jump, split between a core $75M fund and a $25M opportunistic vehicle called Daybreak Meridian. Sector-agnostic, but the filter is explicit: back AI-native founders with ideas big enough to underpin $1B+ in revenue if they work.
Relentless ($80M, Fund I). Damir Becirovic left Index Ventures, where he helped lead bets on Discord, Patreon, and Rec Room, to write seed checks into consumer, marketplace, and creator-economy founders full-time. The pitch to founders: full commitment, fast capital, a board seat, and no thin spreading across a forty-company portfolio.
The Cannon Project ($63M, Fund II). Not really a fund in the traditional sense: Ian Feeney’s NYC operation builds founding teams from scratch before it invests, then backs the ones it built into market-leading software companies. A company-builder wearing a fund’s clothing.
Large Emerging Funds
Banner VC ($225M, Fund I). The largest debut fund in this cohort, and one of the quarter’s more pointed backstories: founded by Brooks Morgan and Adam Ramada, both former staffers at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), betting that experience inside the federal bureaucracy translates into conviction on aerospace, defense, and dual-use hardware. The firm helped co-lead Impulse Space’s $500M Series D alongside 137 Ventures.
TMV ($200M, TMV Logistics vehicle). Soraya Darabi’s fund is a straightforward bet that US maritime infrastructure (ports, shipbuilding, intermodal logistics) is overdue for a rebuild, anchored by two genuinely strategic LPs: the American Bureau of Shipping and Prologis Ventures, giving portfolio companies a direct line into the industry they’re trying to disrupt.
Mega Funds
15 funds cleared our platform bar – either a $500M+ close, or a known multi-fund franchise:
Between them, they raised $27.1B which is more than the other 122 funds combined, several times over.
3 sit outside the US: Jeito Capital and Lauxera Growth II (both Paris healthcare growth vehicles) and E2D (a Franco-German defense-tech JV).
3 Chinese platforms (BAI Capital, Lanchi Ventures, Luminous Ventures).
The rest is a US roll call that reads like a “who’s still standing” list from 2021.
Another key dynamic worth highlighting is why each of them is raising right now, because almost none of them are raising on a generic thesis. Nearly every mega-fund in this cohort is monetizing, or doubling down on, one specific bet, so below, we combined all 15, in size order, with the actual brief story/catalyst behind the raise.
Sequoia Capital – $7B Expansion Fund. Nearly double the $3.4B comparable vehicle Sequoia raised in 2022, and the first major capital raise under the new co-stewardship of Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, who took over the 54-year-old firm in late 2025. The money is earmarked to deepen stakes in Sequoia’s two AI heavyweights – OpenAI, an original backer, and Anthropic, which Sequoia controversially decided to back in January despite already holding rival stakes in OpenAI and xAI (both reportedly eyeing 2026 IPOs). Some of it is also flowing into buzzier bets like robotics startup Physical Intelligence and AI-coding agent maker Factory.
Accel – $5B Leaders Fund V. Structured as $4B for concentrated late-stage bets (20+ investments averaging ~$200M each) plus a $650M “sidecar” that lets existing LPs increase exposure to specific winners. Bloomberg’s own headline says it plainly: “Anthropic, Cursor Backer Accel Raises $5 Billion for Big AI Bets.” The raise reportedly followed a sharp run-up in Accel’s Anthropic and Cursor returns, and pushes the firm’s AUM to $36B.
Menlo Ventures – $3B across two funds. This is the fund the whole “why now” question was written for. TechCrunch’s own headline: “After betting the firm on Anthropic, Menlo Ventures raises victorious $3B fund.” In 2024, Menlo pre-emptively led Anthropic’s $750M Series D (an unusually aggressive move for the still-shaky post-2022 market) structuring roughly $500M as an SPV plus $250M from its own fund. That stake is now worth close to $14B as Anthropic’s valuation has climbed past $900B. Menlo compounded the position by co-launching a $100M “Anthology” scout fund with Anthropic itself, since grown to ~$250M deployed across 60+ AI startups. The Washington State Investment Board,a 43-year LP relationship worth $1.8B+ across 17 Menlo funds, committed up to $400M combined to the two new vehicles, about as explicit a re-up vote of confidence as an LP can cast.
a16z crypto – $2.2B Fund V. Less than half the $4.5B raised for Fund IV in 2022, reflecting a cooler crypto market (Bitcoin and Ethereum were both trading well below 2025 highs at close). Chris Dixon’s own framing: this fund backs founders “turning new infrastructure into products people use every day” like stablecoins, tokenization, prediction markets, AI agents – a pivot from raw protocol speculation toward applied financial products, built on the firm’s actual wins (Anchorage Digital, Uniswap, Kalshi). Notably, a16z crypto explicitly declined to chase the AI boom with this vehicle: a spokesperson told Fortune “Fund 5 is 100% dedicated to investing in crypto entrepreneurs,” a direct contrast with Haun Ventures’ more blended mandate below.
Benchmark – $2B across two funds. A genuine break from 20+ years of discipline: $750M for a 12th flagship early-stage fund, and for the first time in the firm’s history – a separate $1.25B growth fund. The specific trigger, per a person familiar with the firm’s strategy: Cerebras’s May 2026 IPO returned Benchmark $3.25B at IPO price on a Series A position first taken in 2016. That windfall funded the new growth vehicle, which will make just 5 or 6 large, concentrated investments. There’s a catch-up subtext too: Benchmark’s historically small check sizes shut it out of the foundation-model race entirely with no position in OpenAI, Anthropic, or any comparable lab, making this raise as much a course-correction as a victory lap.
Eclipse – $1.3B across two funds. Eclipse’s largest raise ever, pushing firm AUM to roughly $10B, sold explicitly on “physical AI” – the thesis that AI’s next wave moves off screens and into factories, vehicles, and infrastructure. Lior Susan frames the portfolio as a “connected industrial economy,” where companies share manufacturing expertise and customer networks with each other. Proof points: Cerebras (Susan sits on the board), Redwood Materials, UK autonomous-driving firm Wayve, and industrial robotics lab Mind Robotics.
Jeito Capital – Fund II, $1.17B. The largest raise ever by a fully independent European biopharma fund, per founder Rafaèle Tordjman, anchored by two 2024 exits: EyeBio’s $1.3B acquisition by Merck, and Hi-Bio’s $1.15B buyout by Biogen – both now cited as proof that European clinical-stage biotech can produce US-pharma-scale outcomes. The nearly-doubled fund size (vs. €534M for Fund I) lets Jeito write up to $175M per company across 15-20 biopharmas, betting bigger on fewer, more advanced companies rather than spreading thinner.
Haun Ventures – Fund II, $1B. Directly underwritten by two exits: Stripe’s $1.1B acquisition of Bridge (Haun invested at a $100M valuation) and Mastercard’s $1.8B acquisition of BVNK, the largest stablecoin acquisition to date. Katie Haun’s own framing: “we’re not pivoting to be an AI fund... we want to do AI that is in our lane” – meaning the agentic economy, specifically AI agents that need to transact, pay, and access credit natively, an adjacent expansion from crypto rather than a pivot away from it. The live proof point for that new thesis: Palmer Luckey’s Erebor digital bank, a $350M raise at a $4.35B valuation.
BAI Capital – $600M first close of an $800M target. Worth being precise here: this is a first close, not a completed raise. Founder Annabelle Long who built the firm’s predecessor, Bertelsmann Asia Investments, into an early backer of Nio and Mobike is explicitly avoiding the now-toxic “China VC” label in favor of a “cross-regional” pitch: Chinese champions expanding overseas, Asian companies going global, and international companies using China to scale. The underlying LP pitch is a DPI track record, not a thesis: 22 IPOs and 51 trade-sale/secondary exits across 18 years.
Luminous Ventures – $733.4M dual-currency. The 2025 rebrand from Lightspeed China Partners reflects, per the firm, an “evolution into a fully localized investment institution” no longer tied to the US Lightspeed brand. The raise is directly powered by an active exit pipeline: 6 portfolio IPOs in the past year, including AI chipmaker MetaX’s $596M STAR Market listing, with roughly ten more expected in 2026, headlined by humanoid-robotics leader Unitree Robotics. Founding Partner James Mi, who made his name backing Meituan, Pinduoduo, and ByteDance early, says the firm deliberately capped this fund below what it could have raised, to preserve deployment discipline.
137 Ventures – $700M across two growth-stage funds. The causal story here is about as concentrated as it gets: 137 Ventures has held roughly a 1%+ stake in SpaceX since 2010, now valued above $10B, and this raise is explicitly positioning the firm to be one of the largest beneficiaries of SpaceX’s expected IPO – a listing reportedly targeting a valuation above $1 trillion. The fund’s AUM is almost secondary to the single asset sitting inside it.
E2D – Fund I, $570M. A Franco-German JV between Earlybird and Paris-based AVP, built on a stark capital-gap argument: the US has historically captured roughly 85% of NATO-aligned defense-tech VC funding, against Europe’s roughly 6% in 2025. This is a gap the firm argues is untenable against France’s €76B and Germany’s €152B defense pledges and the EU’s €800B rearmament plan. Co-founder Roland Manger’s goal, in his own words, is to “foster a more resilient and sovereign European ecosystem.” Airbus Defence and Space is confirmed as an anchor investor, and the fund’s first investment, French counter-drone firm Alta Ares, which already has an Airbus MOU, is cited by both partners as validating the thesis in real time.
Lauxera Capital Partners – Growth II, $566M / €520M. Closed above its €500M hard cap, and nearly double Fund I, on the strength of one very well-timed exit: Fund I portfolio company OrganOx (UK medtech) was acquired by Terumo for roughly $1.5B in October 2025 after growing revenue 5x, and founder Pierre Moustial says that exit “arrived late in the fundraising and pushed the final close above the hard cap.” The thesis: back commercial-stage European healthtech companies specifically to fund their US market expansion, on the argument that Europe produces three times more healthtech innovation per capita than the US does.
Lanchi Ventures – Fund IV, ~$560M dual-currency. Actually 29% smaller than its $805M 2022 predecessor – deliberate discipline, not weakness, in a selective USD-China fundraising climate. Founder Jui Tan: “if Chinese tech talent is given enough room and support, it will lead the world in frontier fields such as artificial intelligence.” Named proof points backing that bet: Moonshot AI (maker of Kimi), embodied-AI robotics firms Galbot and Agibot, and Genspark, which hit $250M in annualized revenue eleven months after launch.
Lightrock – Accelerate7, $500M. Formally the “Energy Access Acceleration Fund,” built with Southeast Asia investor TRIREC and dedicated to UN Sustainable Development Goal 7 – narrower than generic “climate tech,” targeting $10-50M growth checks in electricity access, clean cooking, and enabling technology across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Backed by Equinor, Shell, TotalEnergies, and LGT, with 4 confirmed seed portfolio companies already generating real revenue: rooftop-solar player SolarSquare, off-grid solar firm Sun King, EV maker Euler Motors, and clean-cookstove company ATEC Global.
Verticals Breakdown
Strip out generalist/multi-stage funds (55% of dollars, but not a sector bet) and look at where actual thematic conviction went this quarter:
Deep Tech / Hard Tech / Robotics – $3.45B across 16 funds, the most broad-based category in the dataset. Led by Eclipse ($1.30B), Luminous Ventures ($733M), and Playground Global ($475M), but with real depth underneath – university spinout funds (Northern Gritstone), quantum specialists (Ground State Ventures), and a Greek deep-tech debut (Skybound) all closed independently.
Crypto/Web3 – $3.92B, but almost entirely three checks. a16z crypto ($2.2B), Haun Ventures ($1B), and Framework Ventures ($400M) account for 92% of the category. Crypto’s Q2 “recovery” is a story about 3 franchises re-upping, not broad LP re-entry into the sector.
Healthcare/Biotech – $2.64B across 10 sized funds, two-thirds of it from two France-based growth funds (Jeito Capital, Lauxera Capital Partners). Below that, real variety: oncology (Oncology Ventures), neuroscience (Newfund’s HEKA), and debut life-sciences funds in Greece and Canada.
Climate/Energy/Industrial – $1.9B across 11 funds. Lightrock’s $500M (backed by Equinor, Shell, TotalEnergies) anchors the category. Underneath it, much smaller specialist seed funds – wildfire tech, African e-mobility, circular economy in Asia.
Defense/Dual-Use/Frontier – $1.27B across 9 funds, the fastest-growing story even if not the biggest dollar bucket. E2D’s $570M Franco-German JV, Banner VC’s $225M debut, and a Nordic-industrialist-backed Ukraine vehicle (Sandwater’s “Gardar”) all closed independently within the same 90 days.
Fintech, Enterprise/B2B SaaS, Consumer/Creator, Impact, and Marketplaces rounded out the quarter at $742M, $934M, $514M, $566M, and $276M respectively – smaller in aggregate, but each with a legitimate anchor deal (Santander’s Mouro in fintech, Blue Cloud in enterprise SaaS) and a long tail of $10-50M debut checks.
Emerging managers’ sector mix also looks nothing like the market as a whole:
Climate/Energy/Industrial and Defense/Dual-Use/Frontier are their two biggest categories (15% and 14% of emerging dollars) – both proportionally tiny in the overall Q2 mix (5% and 3%).
Impact, Consumer/Creator, and Enterprise/B2B SaaS are also disproportionately emerging territory.
Crypto/Web3 and Generalist/Multi-stage (the two biggest categories overall) are where emerging managers are least represented, at just 2% and 8% of emerging dollars versus 10% and 55% of the whole market.
Geographic Breakdown
Geographically, Q2 was a US-and-Europe story with a handful of sharp regional exceptions underneath it:
The US and Europe combined for 111 of 137 closes (81%) and $35.3B of the $39.26B tracked (90%).
Israel, China, Japan, India, Canada, South Africa, and a scattering of others split the remaining 10%.
That headline split undersells how differently the US and Europe actually got there, and before we dive deeper into specific fund names across every category it’s worth mentioning a few things:
United States: 63 funds, $28.2B – by far the largest bucket on both dimensions, and the one doing most of the work behind the Barbell and Mega Funds sections above: nearly every name in this report’s $500M+ tier is American.
Europe: 48 funds against the US’s 63 – that’s 76% of the US’s deal count, a relatively small gap in fund count, but Europe raised $7.1B against the US’s $28.2B: 25% of the capital, a gap of nearly 4x.
By number of funds closed, Europe is nearly keeping pace with the US this quarter, but by dollars, it’s not even close – which signals that the same barbell pattern we find inside fund sizes shows up again here, just cut by geography instead of manager type.
Underneath that gap, public and development-finance capital is doing a lot of work: 8 of the UK’s 18 closes list the British Business Bank as an LP, and 6 European funds carry the European Investment Fund, alongside KfW, Bpifrance, and CDP Venture Capital.
France punched above its weight – just 6 funds, but $2.66B, almost entirely from two large healthcare growth vehicles (Jeito Capital, Lauxera Growth II) and one defense JV (E2D).
Israel: Only 6 funds and $660M, but a sharp thematic skew: 4 of the 6 (AlphaDrive Ventures, Deep33 Ventures, Stratos, Surround Ventures) are explicitly AI-infra, deep-tech, or defense-focused.
Asia: China, Japan, India, and Singapore combined for 10 funds and $2.37B – but China alone accounted for $2.09B of it (BAI Capital’s $800M first close, Lanchi Ventures’ $560M, Luminous Ventures’ $733M), while India’s 3 funds totaled just $145M. Two very different fundraising climates sitting under one regional label.
The rest of the map was thin: Canada closed 4 funds worth $361M (Lumira Ventures, Version One Ventures, N49P, and Top Down), and South Africa closed 2 (Botswana Tech Fund, Holocene) worth $70.5M combined, and we did not find a single Latin America-headquartered fund closing in this dataset this quarter.
Emerging managers alone raised $4.93B across 76 funds, and their geographic mix skews differently from the market overall:
The US still leads (34 funds, $2.16B).
Europe punches above its weight here – 26 funds and $1.53B, or 31% of all emerging-manager dollars, well above Europe’s 18% share of the total Q2 market.
Israel (6 funds, $660M) rounds out the only other meaningful cluster and everywhere else (Asia, India, Africa, Canada) stayed in single digits.
Capital Concentration
Another key dynamic to look at is how capital is concentrated across funds of different scales and stages – specifically, how visible the barbell effect is in the market. Beezer Clarkson from LGT Capital Partners / Open LP raised this same question in a recent post where we shared a H1 data snapshot from our dataset.
So we took all the funds and split them into 3 buckets:
Emerging (Fund I or II, under $250M)
Mega/Platform (a known multi-fund platform, or any fund at $500M+)
Middle (everything else)
The result is a genuine barbell, but only when looking at dollars, not fund count:
By count, this quarter looked like a standard power law distribution: a large number of small funds, a handful of giants, and no real dip in the middle.
By dollars, it takes a very different shape: 11% of the funds absorbed 69% of the capital, while 55% of the funds on the smaller end fought over just 13%.
So the “middle” is disappearing in a from of share of capital. A $150-400M generalist fund raising its Fund III/IV is competing for LP attention against both ends of this barbell, and seems to lose that fight for dollars even when it isn’t losing the fight to exist.
This tells the exact same story as the median-vs-mean gap, just from another angle: a median close of $78M compared to a $293M average (a ~3.7x spread) illustrates the barbell effect in a single pair of metrics.
LP Analysis
Of the 137 funds we tracked, 73 disclosed at least one named LP, which is enough to sketch a real picture of who’s underwriting this market. So we scraped those mentions of allocators behind the funds, analyzed which funds and strategies they backed, and uncovered a few interesting insights:
Development finance institutions are the single most common LP type we found – present on 27 of the 73 disclosed cap tables, ahead of corporates and strategics (21) and well ahead of celebrities (9), fund-of-funds (9), family offices (7), endowments (5), and banks (3). The British Business Bank alone backed 8 funds (every one of them a UK emerging manager), and the European Investment Fund backed 6 more across the continent. If you’re a European emerging manager raising right now, a development bank is a more realistic first conversation than a US endowment.
Corporates are the second-biggest LP category, mostly in CVC-adjacent structures: Santander (Mouro), BMW (BMW i Ventures), Sony (Sony Innovation Fund 4), Northwestern Mutual, MUFG Bank, and a cluster of cancer centers backing Oncology Ventures directly. By sector, corporate money concentrates hardest in Climate/Energy and Healthcare/Biotech (14 mentions each). Strategics are writing checks close to their own core business, not spreading into unrelated categories.
Celebrity LPs are a small but real category – and more concentrated than the roster of names alone suggests. Of 26 celebrity-LP mentions this quarter, exactly half (13) sit inside a single fund: Animal Capital’s $33M Fund III, whose LPs include Paris Hilton, Mark Wahlberg, Christina Aguilera, James Corden, and Mr. Beast. As a category, celebrity money is overwhelmingly a Consumer/Creator story (14 of 26 mentions, 54%), not spread across sectors the way corporate or DFI capital is. The rest of this quarter’s celebrity names are tech-operator angel money riding alongside more traditional funds: Reid Hoffman and Stewart Butterfield (Wisdom Ventures), Palmer Luckey and Brian Armstrong (Discipulus Ventures), the Collison brothers (Convective Capital).
Fund-of-funds and family offices round out the smaller categories (9 and 7 funds respectively). Northleaf Capital Partners alone backed 3 of the quarter’s funds (Lumira Ventures, N49P, and Version One Ventures) all three Canadian, making it the closest thing in this dataset to a go-to allocator for that specific market.
Outside the DFI cluster, this market isn’t being carried by a small set of repeat backers. Of the 242 uniquely named LPs across all 73 disclosed cap tables, only 11 backed more than one fund this quarter. The long tail is real: most of the LP relationships visible in Q2 2026 are one-off commitments, not a recycling pool of the same allocators moving fund to fund.
Taken together, the LP side of this market mirrors the fund side: concentrated in a few specific places (DFIs in Europe, corporates in their own sectors, celebrities in one or two vehicles), thin everywhere else, and mostly non-recurring outside a handful of repeat institutional names.
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$3.45B across 16 deep tech funds is massive. Great to see more capital backing deep tech founders. The momentum is clearly shifting toward the nerds. Climate, energy, healthcare, and AI/ML are leading the way.