Unicorn hunters

There are 74 private US companies valued at a billion dollars or more, according to our real-time unicorn tracker. We used CB Insights data to analyze which investors have backed the most unicorns and are in the best position to capitalize should these companies manage to exit for the valuations they’re receiving in private markets.

Sequoia Capital continues to retain its spot as the top investor in unicorns, with 17 currently in their portfolio including Instacart, AirBnB, and Square. Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz were tied for second place with 15 unicorn companies each. Some other interesting points:

• 4 of the top 8 investors in unicorns are large, typically public market investors (mutual fund, bulge-bracket investment banks, etc.). Goldman, Fidelity Investments, Wellington Management, and T. Rowe Price all have 12 or more US unicorns in their portfolios.
• There are now 43 institutional investors with at least 5 US unicorns in their portfolio, compared to 14 when we did this analysis in early March.

Skilled investors are able to get into these valuable companies early, so we evaluated which firms were able to get into the most unicorns at the early stages (Seed and Series A).

When we last did this analysis in March 2014, Sequoia was the top early-stage investor in unicorns. But since then it has dropped to second, with SV Angel taking the top spot with 9 of their total 12 unicorns being early investments. Benchmark followed soon after Sequoia with 7 early-stage investments into some of the most valuable unicorns (four months ago they only had 3).

The proportion of unicorn investments that were early-stage offers another way to gauge the firms’ relative investment prowess. Below is a full list of the top investors in unicorn companies as well as the number of those unicorns which they invested in at the early stages. Some of the best investors on this list are SV Angel (12 unicorns with 9 investments at the early stage), Y-Combinator (6 unicorns and 6 early-stage investments in unicorns), as well as First Round Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Lowercase Capital.