Before OpenAI became a trillion-dollar IPO candidate, before AI coding assistants generated billions in revenue, and before defense tech became one of Silicon Valley’s hottest categories, a small group of seed investors had already made their bets.

They backed frontier AI, autonomous systems, cybersecurity and AI infrastructure years before the market went all-in on these sectors. In many cases, they invested before startups had meaningful revenue, before products existed and before entire categories had fully formed.

That is what separates the best seed investors from the rest of venture capital. Later-stage investors can rely on traction, growth metrics and market validation. Seed investors operate with far less certainty. They are underwriting founders, technical insight and the possibility that an idea the market barely understands could eventually reshape an industry.

The Forbes Midas Seed List, now in its fifth year, tracks the investors who consistently make those bets earliest—and most successfully.

This year’s rankings arrive during the massive AI capital cycle. As billions flood into foundation models, agentic AI, robotics, cybersecurity and defense technology, many of the industry’s biggest successes can be traced back to seed checks written when the outcomes still were highly speculative.

The investors climbing this year’s rankings did not simply identify strong companies early. They recognized important technological shifts before most of Silicon Valley fully understood where the market was heading.

Below are seven investors whose early conviction in AI and frontier technology helped shape the next generation of category-defining companies.

1. Gili Raanan, Cyberstarts (#1)

Key investments: Wiz, Fireblocks, Cyera, Island

When Gili Raanan invested $6.4 million into Wiz’s seed round in early 2020, cloud security was still widely viewed as fragmented infrastructure software, not one of the most important battlegrounds of the AI era.

Weeks later, the pandemic accelerated global remote work adoption and abruptly expanded enterprise cloud exposure. Almost overnight, cloud infrastructure became mission critical.

Five years later, Google acquired Wiz for $32 billion in cash, one of the largest venture-backed acquisitions in history. For many early investors, the deal generated exceptional returns. For Raanan, whose position reportedly returned roughly 200 times his original investment, it became one of the defining seed wins of the decade.

But Wiz was hardly an isolated success.

Raanan also backed Cyera, Fireblocks and Island at the seed stage, companies operating across cloud security, digital asset infrastructure and enterprise browsing. Together, they reflect a broader thesis that AI expansion would dramatically increase the complexity and vulnerability of enterprise systems.

Raanan has spent years investing around a simple idea: attackers evolve faster than incumbents. The companies that anticipate where security threats are moving next often become the next generation of cyber leaders.

Key investments: Anysphere (Cursor), Kalshi, Vanta

Ali Partovi’s investment in Anysphere began with a handwritten coding test.

In 2019, while visiting MIT, Partovi met freshman Michael Truell and asked him to complete a programming challenge by hand. Truell finished it in roughly 15

15 minutes. Years later, Partovi wrote one of the first checks into Truell’s startup, Anysphere, the company behind AI coding tool Cursor.

That investment became one of the defining seed bets of the AI era.

Cursor’s growth has been nearly unprecedented in enterprise software. The company had reportedly surpassed $2 billion in annual recurring revenue and reached a valuation approaching $30 billion, making it one of the fastest-scaling software businesses in history. In April, SpaceX signed an option to buy the company for $60 billion.

Partovi’s broader portfolio reveals a consistent pattern: backing products that create entirely new user behaviors before those markets fully exist. He invested early in Kalshi, the prediction-market platform that surged during the 2024 election cycle, and Vanta, which helped automate security compliance for startups long before compliance automation became mainstream.

Neo’s early positions in Cursor and Kalshi are now collectively worth more than $1 billion on paper, according to firm estimates reported by The Wall Street Journal – a striking outcome for the accelerator built around identifying technical talent at the earliest possible stage.

3. David Tisch, BoxGroup (#4)

Key investments: Ramp, Ro, Clover Health, Anysphere (Cursor), Clay

David Tisch built BoxGroup around an unusual philosophy for venture capital: be useful to everyone and compete with almost no one.

He describes the firm as “the Switzerland of VC” – a high-volume, collaborative seed investor that writes relatively small checks across a wide range of sectors while avoiding the aggressive ownership battles common in Silicon Valley.

That strategy has quietly produced one of the broadest seed portfolios in venture capital. Tisch invested early in fintech giant Ramp well before the company became one of the world’s most valuable private financial software businesses. He also backed healthcare companies including Ro, Clover Health and K Health as AI and software began reshaping how care is delivered and managed.

Many of those investments shared a common theme years before it became obvious to the market: highly regulated industries were being transformed by software.

Rather than concentrating around a single AI thesis, Tisch built exposure across multiple sectors undergoing technological reinvention simultaneously.

4. Topher Conway, SV Angel (#5)

Key investments: Safe Superintelligence, Cerebras, Hugging Face, Stripe, Deel

Topher Conway has spent much of the past decade building one of Silicon Valley’s broadest portfolios across the AI stack.

At SV Angel, the firm founded by his

father Ron Conway, he developed an investment style centered on founder relationships, speed and deep technical curiosity. Rather than concentrating narrowly around one AI thesis, Conway has backed companies spanning frontier models, AI infrastructure, semiconductors, open-source tooling and vertical applications—often before those markets fully formed.

That breadth is increasingly paying off.

Conway participated in Safe Superintelligence’s massive seed financing just months after former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever founded the company in 2024. He was also an early backer of Hugging Face, which became one of the central hubs of the open-source AI ecosystem, as well as Cerebras, Together AI and Applied Intuition.

At the application layer, Conway invested early in Harvey, a company that has emerged as one of the leading platforms in legal AI.

Conway’s portfolio reflects a broader belief that AI’s biggest winners will not emerge from one layer of the stack alone. Models, infrastructure, open-source tooling and applications are all compounding simultaneously, and Conway managed to establish early exposure across nearly all of them.

5. Ross Fubini, XYZ Venture Capital (#8)

Key investments: Anduril, Verkada, Apex Space, Formlabs, Peregrine

Ross Fubini began investing in defense technology years before the category became hot in Silicon Valley.

When he founded XYZ Venture Capital in 2017, much of the venture industry still

viewed government and defense as slow-moving, difficult markets poorly suited for venture-backed software companies. Fubini saw the opposite opportunity: that advances in AI, autonomy and hardware would eventually force a technological reinvention of national security infrastructure.

That thesis led him to Anduril.

Fubini invested in the company’s seed round in 2017, long before defense technology became one of the hottest sectors in venture capital. At the time, Anduril’s software-first approach to defense systems was far from mainstream venture consensus. Today, the company is one of the world’s most valuable private defense businesses and a success story for Silicon Valley’s industrial AI movement.

The same pattern runs throughout Fubini’s portfolio.

He also backed Verkada, which builds AI-powered security systems for enterprises and governments, Apex Space, which develops satellite buses for commercial and defense applications, and Formlabs, one of the leading companies in industrial 3D printing.

Fubini’s investments consistently center on a similar idea: AI’s most transformative impact may ultimately occur not inside chatbots, but in the physical world—in factories, satellites, security systems and defense infrastructure.

6. Sarah Guo, Conviction (#14)

Key investments: Mistral AI, Reflection AI, Sierra, Physical Intelligence, Cognition

Few investors have risen faster during the generative AI era than Sarah Guo.

After becoming one of Greylock’s youngest general partners, Guo left in 2022 to launch Conviction, an AI-focused

investment firm built around the belief that frontier models and autonomous agents would fundamentally reshape software. Within just a few years, she assembled one of the strongest early-stage AI portfolios in venture capital.

Guo backed Mistral AI and Reflection AI at the seed stage, recognizing early momentum around open-weight models and next-generation training systems. She also invested in Sierra before the company publicly launched, betting that AI agents would become a major enterprise software category well before the market fully appreciated the opportunity.

The same willingness to move early appears throughout her portfolio. Guo also backed robotics startup Physical Intelligence before it emerged from stealth, reflecting her broader belief that AI will increasingly move beyond software and into physical systems.

What distinguishes Guo from many AI-focused investors is not simply that she backed AI early. It is that she repeatedly identified category leaders before the categories themselves became obvious.

In a market crowded with AI capital, that ability has become increasingly rare.

7. Greg Castle, Anorak Ventures (#17)

Key investments: Anduril, Flock Safety, Rec Room, Mux

Long before “physical AI” became a mainstream venture theme, Greg Castle was investing around the convergence of robotics, spatial computing and machine intelligence.

Castle founded Anorak Ventures in 2016 around the idea that computing would increasingly move beyond flat screens and into the real world. At the time, that thesis was a contrarian one.

That early conviction led him to Anduril and Flock Safety before either company became central players in the defense-tech boom now sweeping Silicon Valley.

Castle invested in Anduril’s seed round in 2017, years before defense technology got hot. He also backed Flock Safety early as the company developed AI-powered public safety systems now deployed across thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide.

But Castle’s interests extend beyond defense.

He was also an early investor in Oculus before its acquisition by Facebook, as well as social VR platform Rec Room and video infrastructure company Mux. Across those investments runs a consistent theme: software is increasingly interacting with the physical world in real time, whether through robotics, spatial interfaces, autonomous systems or intelligent infrastructure.

Years before much of Silicon Valley embraced “physical AI,” Castle was already building a portfolio around it.