Welcome to the twenty-eighth edition of Dealroom News, the weekly newsletter where we bring the data to cover and analyse some of the most important global technology developments.
This week, we're discussing the newest edition of Dealroom's Power Law Investor Ranking that we produce annually. Read on to learn more about the rationale behind the ranking, the importance of the power law for the startup and VC industry — and this year's results.
We're constantly working on improving this newsletter — and nothing can be of more help than your feedback. If you have any questions, suggestions, or opinions, please do sent them our way by replying to this email.
Now, let's dive into this week's edition.
Andrii Degeler,
Head of News at Dealroom.co
Seed investing: Steeper than F1 and tennis
The latest data is in: only 25 investors in the world — the top 0.13% — have backed 11 or more startups that reach the unicorn status or $100 million in revenues.
That handful drives a disproportionate share of venture returns — and is the focus of our eighth annual Power Law Investor Ranking, naming the top investors who bend the curve and deliver disproportionately high returns.
The global startup and venture capital ecosystem runs on the power law. Unlike the rest of the investment world, where it's important to have a portfolio of good-performing companies, VC funds are often returned by one or two bets that deliver outsized growth. We call those power law outcomes and define them as either unicorn startups with valuations above $1 billion or thoroughbreds, i.e., companies with over $100 million in revenue.
Power law outcomes are extremely rare: only 1.5% of VC-backed startups ever become thoroughbreds. Of the 19,581 investors in our dataset, 17,445 (89.1%) have never funded a $100-million-revenue startup from the seed stage; another 8.2% have done it exactly once.
Other fields defined by power law are Formula 1, tennis, book sales, or box office. Seed investing has the steepest curve among them all when it comes to the gap between each following contestant (check out the interactive infographic on our website).
All this is to say: understanding the dynamics of power law is important for anyone working in the startup ecosystem, and so is knowing who that handful of investors who actually bend the curve are. And that's why we've built the Power Law Investor Ranking — an independent and unbiased way of looking at the VC ecosystem, which we've been publishing yearly since 2019.
Our scoring model for this ranking doesn't take into account the brand strength or assets under management of any given investor, but looks at the outcomes. Funding a power law outcome from seed stage yields the most points, followed by later stages, as well as the number of companies with over $25 million revenues, or colts, in the portfolio.
The top of this year's ranking has not changed much compared to 2025: Y Combinator is by far the leader thanks to the sheer number of good bets it's made over the years through its acceleration programme. Sequoia comes next, followed by SV Angel, Accel, and a16z. Phoenix Court is the highest-placed European VC, and BECO Capital leads in the MENA region.
When it comes to accelerators, Y Combinator is the only game in town. With 126 seed investments that reached unicorn status and 97 bets resulting in above $100 million revenue, it's far ahead of Techstars, which holds second place — which, in turn, has a significant lead on the third place taken by AngelPad.
In the EMEA region (in terms of the origin of startups rather than investors), the group of leading VCs is tighter than elsewhere, with Phoenix Court, Index, Accel, and Point Nine in the lead.
In MENA, Dubai-based BECO Capital and Raed Ventures from Saudi Arabia are at the top, followed by Sequoia, UAE-based Crescent, and Mubadala, a sovereign wealth fund from Abu Dhabi.
The US is a clear global leader by the number of VCs that have backed at least one startup at seed to reach $100 million in revenue. With 1,238 such VCs, it's far ahead of the UK (161), which is followed by Germany (75). Europe as a whole accounts for 525 — still less than half of the US.
This year's ranking once again emphasises how deeply the global startup and VC industry is rooted in the concept of power law, as it's governed by it on all levels. More than actually ranking the VCs in a list, it aims to outline and highlight the leading group of investors carrying the bulk of the industry's returns.
China's frontier AI labs are pulling in record cheques. DeepSeek is raising its first-ever round of up to $7.35 billion at a valuation of around $51.5 billion, with founder Liang Wenfeng expected to write the biggest cheque himself. The Hangzhou-based company has also told investors it will accelerate model releases and push commercialisation. Beijing-based Moonshot AI, meanwhile, raised $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation in a round led by Meituan's venture arm, on $200 million in annual recurring revenue from its Kimi chatbot and AI model services.
The court battle between Elon Musk and Sam Altman is in full swing. The high-stakes fight focuses on whether OpenAI abandoned its original nonprofit, “for humanity” mission in favour of profit, with Musk arguing he was misled and that OpenAI’s restructuring and ties to Microsoft violated that founding agreement. Now, Musk is seeking massive damages, a return to nonprofit control, and even Altman’s removal, while OpenAI says the lawsuit is really a competitive attack from a rival and insists Musk’s claims are overstated. The judge has already narrowed some claims, and the case is now focused on alleged breach of charitable trust, fraud, and unjust enrichment rather than a broad attack on AI safety policy.
OnlyFans, the British streaming platform popular with creators and sex workers, has agreed to sell a 16% stake to San Francisco-based Architect Capital at a $3.1 billion valuation. The deal leaves control with the family trust of late owner Leonid Radvinsky, while a special-purpose vehicle financed by figures including Australian billionaire James Packer and Slow Ventures' Sam Lessin underwrites Architect's investment. OnlyFans generates almost $1.6 billion in annual net revenue and Architect believes it could go public as soon as 2028.
Isomorphic Labs, the London-based AI drug discovery company spun out of Alphabet's Google DeepMind, is in advanced discussions to raise more than $2 billion in a new funding round, according to Bloomberg. Thrive Capital is set to lead the financing, with Alphabet also participating. The round would follow last year's $600 million raise — also led by Thrive — and underscores the volume of capital flowing into AI-for-science startups, as investors bet that transformer architectures can fundamentally alter how medicines are designed.
SAP has agreed to acquirePrior Labs, a Freiburg-based startup building tabular foundation models — AI purpose-built for structured business data such as spreadsheets and databases. The German enterprise software giant will invest more than €1 billion over four years to scale Prior Labs into a frontier AI research lab. The deal — reportedly €700 million upfront plus a €300 million earnout — is one of the most significant enterprise AI research investments ever made in Europe by a European company, and one of the fastest exits in recent European tech.
Panthalassa, the Oregon-based startup that uses wave energy to power floating data centres, has raised $140 million in a round led by Peter Thiel, valuing the company at close to $1 billion. Other new backers include Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, PayPal and Affirm co-founder Max Levchin, and early Google investor John Doerr. The capital will scale a pilot manufacturing facility, with commercial deployments planned for next year as AI's energy bottleneck pushes investors toward increasingly exotic frontiers, from mothballed nuclear stations to space-based solar.
GameStop chief executive Ryan Cohen has made an unsolicited bid to buy eBay for about $56 billion, pitching the e-commerce marketplace as a future competitor to Amazon. The cash-and-stock offer of $125 a share — a 20% premium to eBay's pre-leak closing price — comes after GameStop quietly built a 5% stake. The videogame retailer, much smaller than its target at around $12 billion, has $9 billion in cash and a $20 billion debt commitment from TD Bank, leaving a sizeable funding gap to bridge.
xAI has signed a compute partnership with Anthropic, giving the Claude maker access to Colossus 1, one of the world's largest AI supercomputers, featuring more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. Anthropic plans to use the capacity to expand support for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers. The deal extends further: Anthropic also expressed interest in working with xAI's parent SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity — once the engineering challenges of putting data centres into space can be overcome.
This is all for the twenty-eighth edition of Dealroom News — we hope you found it useful! Once again, please do reply to this email and let us know what you think.
