With Employbl we’ve been collecting and collating information about companies in the Bay Area. Slowly we’ve been expanding to other regions throughout the US and adding more companies, but the core of our data right now is about Bay Area tech companies and startups. You can think of us like Crunchbase but free and built for job seekers.
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Here’s the list with links to the Venture Capital’s company profiles on Employbl. In the future I’d like to build up these profiles to have more information. Currently the company profiles have the office location, website and some meta tags. No particular order for the listings here.. ->inRandomOrder().
If you’re looking for a more financial analysis of venture capital firms I’d suggest looking at the Forbes Midas List, Top 20 Venture Capitalists by the NY Times or this article from the Founder Institute.
Top VC Firms Bay Area
Here’s some more info and links to some of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley’s top VC firms:
- a16z: Marc Andreesen was CTO at Netscape Navigator, one of the pioneers of the internet. This is his fund with Ben Horowitz, author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things. The VC company has funded Facebook, GitHub, Okta, Optimizely, Slack and many more. You can view a partial list of a16z portfolio companies here.
- Sequoia Capital has been around since 1972. According to Wikipedia they’ve invested in over 1,000 companies including Google, Apple, Oracle and PayPal. Sequoia Capital portfolio
- Khosla Ventures founded in 2004. You can follow Vinod Khosla on twitter. Khosla-Ventures portfolio. Investments include Affirm, Checkr, Coda, GitLab and HackerRank.
- Accel Partners has made investments in Spotify, Bonobos, Venmo and CrowdStrike. They were founded in the early 1980s.
- Kleiner Perkins aka KPCB was founded in the early 70s and is one of the founding firms of Silicon Valley venture capital.
- Y Combinator is an early stage venture capital fund and accelerator program that many wildly successful and lucrative companies have gone through. You can see Y Combinator companies by valuation here.
- First Round Capital runs a well written industry blog. The full portfolio is on their website. Working on getting the full portfolio tagged on Employbl here.
- Founders Fund has made investments in Airbnb, Lyft, Stripe and was one of the first institutional investments in SpaceX and Facebook. The fund was started by Peter Theil, cofounder of PayPal, author of Zero To One and leading member of the “PayPal Mafia”.
- Benchmark Capital founded in 1995, Benchmark focuses on early-stage venture investing in mobile, marketplaces, social, and infrastructure and enterprise software.
- Social Capital was founded by Chamath Palihapitiya the current owner of the Golden State Warriors. They investor in Yammer and were one of the lead investors in Slack.
- Lightspeed Venture Partners was founded in 2000 and have backed Stitch Fix, Cheddar and hundreds of other startups.
- Spark Capital has invested in Cruise Automation, Wayfair, Twitter, Tumblr, Plaid and Oculus.
- GV was formerly known as Google Ventures. They invested in Uber, Lime, Blue Bottle Coffee and Nest among many others. It was founded in 2009.
- 500 Startups runs an early stage startup accelerator and invests in companies from all around the world.
- Menlo Ventures has been venture capitaling in Silicon Valley since 1976.
- Greylock is one of the earliest venture capital firms still standing in Silicon Valley. They were founded in 1965 and have backed companies like LinkedIn, Nextdoor, workday and Dropbox. You can view the Greylock portfolio here.
- GSR Ventures is a premier global investment firm with $3 billion under management and consists of independently managed funds in China, US, and globally.
This list is based mostly on my perception of venture capital working remotely in the Bay Area as a full stack developer. Picking the “top” VC firms is a bit like picking the most popular kid in high school. It’s subjective, depends on who you ask and is completely subjective. My motivation in compiling this list is to have a reference sheet for top venture capital firms in the Bay Area. These funds control billions of dollars in assets and heavily influence the tech and startup ecosystem in the Bay Area and throughout the world.