The Seed 100: The best early-stage investors of 2026
Bryan Rosenblatt, Shan-Lyn Ma, Ravi Mhatre, Ann DeWitt, and Brandon Reeves. Mr. Nelson design for BI Business Insider's Seed 100 spotlights the early-stage investors with the rare knack for finding tomorrow's tech giants before the rest of the market knows they exist. In the AI boom, the definition of "seed stage" has changed dramatically. Seed investing used to mean spotting Facebook in a dorm room or SpaceX before the rockets worked. Today, it can mean fighting for a stake in a startup before there is a product, revenue, or much of a company at all. As seed rounds swell from small checks into billion-dollar bets, the investors who get in first are taking on more risk — and chasing bigger rewards — than ever. The hottest AI startups are now raising seed rounds measured in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, with investors competing aggressively for access to top technical talent long before there is anything resembling a mature business. Mira Murati...