How Termina selected and ranked the 2025 Seed 100 and Seed 40 lists

The Seed 100 and Seed 40 lists are now in their fifth year in our partnership with Business Insider to objectively identify and celebrate the success of some of the world’s greatest seed investors. In the run of these releases, AI has emerged as a defining characteristic of seed-stage startups today, the results of which will likely drive the lists to come.

To produce the 2025 rankings, we statistically analyzed seed investor performance in 25 areas using Crunchbase and PitchBook data. Since one of our goals is to analyze the prospective success of investors, rather than focus solely on past achievements, we consider only active investors with a minimum of five investments between 2010 and 2025. Our lists include solo venture capitalists and angel investors worldwide, assessed based on their investments in US companies.

The investors that made the cut for the 2025 lists were those with the strongest long-term indicators: exits (initial public offerings or acquisitions). For this year’s ranking, investors whose stronger indicators were follow-on fundraising activity have had their positions affected by the recent pullback in venture capital fundraising.

To be named to the list, seed investors must have:

1. Investments that led to successful exits, including IPOs or acquisitions (exits that were meaningfully above “liquidation preference” or demonstrated increased company value rather than simply raising capital).
2. Investments that display intermediate signs of future success, with seed investments consistently receiving material sums of follow-on investment.
3. Active moderate-to-high seed investing over the previous two years.

Exits statistically have the most influence on differentiating investors. We also updated our methodology this year to weight more recent investments for the intermediate milestones, such as follow-on fundraising.

This year, the candidate pool that met the above criteria was 1,974 investors, a 5% increase from last year’s. Women accounted for 11% of all seed investors in this year’s pool — up from 8% of the first Seed 100’s pool in 2021. This final list included 26 investors that increased their rank, 27 with the same or lower rank, and 47 new investors. Twenty-seven investors in this year’s ranking were also featured in the original 2021 list.

The generative AI wave of seed investing

It’s been two years since OpenAI released its revolutionary large language model GPT-4, which ignited the world’s imagination about the future of artificial intelligence. Having AI at the center of large outcomes is not new; many companies, including Alphabet and Meta, have predicated their business models on it and were successful long before ChatGPT.

You can segment AI into discriminative and generative models. The key difference lies in their objectives. Discriminative models focus on predicting labels and values, or making decisions based on input data, while generative models aim to capture the underlying data distribution and generate samples from that distribution.

The first wave of seed investing in AI was from 2010 to 2018, during which companies included discriminative machine learning in their general business models. For example, companies like Uber, Instacart, Airbnb, and DoorDash were built on discriminative matching and recommendation algorithms.

The new wave of AI was kicked off by generative models, which include large language models like those that power OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Alphabet’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. In a mere two years, the share of companies where AI materially matters to their products has nearly doubled from 13% to 24%. How this evolves will likely greatly influence how the Seed 100 rankings look over the coming years. Since seed investments usually take years to mature, we’re still a few years away from understanding how the new wave of AI investments will perform.

In the chart below, we show five seed investment categories to contextualize the growth of AI investment. Note that this is not an exhaustive view of seed investment sectors. In this view, while there has been steady expansion of AI investing at the seed stage, the jump last year stands out.

Jake Ellowitz is the chief technology officer and cofounder of Termina, which works with venture capital and private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds, and executives to assess investment opportunities.

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