Geu 54 september

Growth Equity Update September 2026 – Edition 54

• Ranking Venture capitalists: In early September Pitchbook issued its latest global ranking of venture capitalists based on a survey of the deal and exit history since 2010 of 37,000 venture firms, aiming to identify consistently successful VC firms producing successful investment outcomes. Its top five global firms emerged as Accel, Index Ventures, Sequoia, Benchmark and Andreessen Horowitz. Its highest ranked European firms were Index Ventures, Balderton Capital, Global Founders Capital, HV (Germany) and Seedcamp. • Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and Accel do consistently well: There is a relatively high correlation with the results of the Strebulaev-Jackson Venture Ranking, a new 2026 ranking of the top 100 US-based VC firms over a 30-year window which we reported on in July. Its ‘transparent, fully data-driven ranking of which VC firms are actually best at what they do’ also ranked Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and Accel in its top five. • Mistral’s $3.5bn Series D - the largest VC raise ever in Europe: Mistral’s recently announced $3.5bn raise is the largest ever for a European start up, beating Mistral’s own $2bn Series C in September 2025. The latest round was led by Samsung Electronics, the Scaleup Europe Fund (managed by EQT) and PSG Equity, valued Mistral at $24bn and will facilitate Mistral’s shift towards offering a full stack alternative likely to appeal to governments and businesses in Europe that are sensitive to sovereignty issues. To accomplish this Mistral is moving to open weight LLM models and towards providing the data centres and private infrastructure a sovereign offer requires. • Europe and Venture capital funding: Europe’s governments continue to look to stimulate venture growth. The brand-new, later stage, Scaleup Europe Fund has already invested in Mistral, Lovable and the Exploration Company. We review the EU’s recent snappily titled report ‘Study of barriers to, and drivers of, the scaling up of funds investing in innovative and growth companies’ and review external commentary on what the EU might do to stimulate growth investment. • No slowdown in the summer: Not much of a summer break for either the US or European VC market in August. US venture raises totalled almost $21bn (vs $6.5bn in August 2025) and European raises of $3.8bn were twice the August 2025 total.

Ranking the top VC firms Independent surveys of the best VC firms see Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Index and Lightspeed do consistently well. In the July edition of the Growth Equity Update we reported on a fascinating study by Stanford University’s Ilya A. Strebulaev and Ohio University’s Blake Jackson which ranks venture investors. Published in mid-June, the authors’ 2026 Venture Ranking of the top 100 US-based VC firms was drawn from more than 230,000 investments by nearly 13,000 venture capitalists over a 30-year window. They describe it as a ‘transparent, fully data-driven ranking of which VC firms are actually best at what they do.’ Sequoia headed the rankings. The points base system produced the top 20 ranking shown in the Exhibit. The top two firms, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, stand out on the ranking by some distance with Sequoia having 2.2x the score of the third ranked firm and Andreessen 1.8x. The top five is filled out by Accel, DST Global and Tiger Global with Index Ventures a close sixth. Their paper can be found here:

Top 20 firms by the Strebulaev-Jackson Venture Ranking score

Source: Strebulaev-jacksoin Venture Ranking score

In early September Pitchbook issued its latest global ranking of venture capitalists based on the outcomes of their investments using PitchBook data on each firm’s deal and exit history. It employs different criteria to the Strebulaev-Jackson study. It is based on three key criteria and in each case investors must have at least 15 examples to be included. The three criteria are. The exit rate: The share of a firm’s investments that reached an acquisition, buyout or public listing. Investments must be at least five years old or have an exit to qualify as an exit opportunity to allow for investments to sufficiently move toward an exit event.…