Business Insider dropped its sixth annual Seed 100 and Seed 40 lists today, naming the top early-stage investors for 2026. The rankings, compiled from 2024-2025 data, paint a venture landscape dominated by artificial intelligence — with seed rounds reaching $2 billion for Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab and $1.03 billion for Yann LeCun’s Advanced Machine Intelligence. But a handful of the same investors also hold positions in crypto-native projects, suggesting the smart money isn't fleeing crypto wholesale.
The AI megadeals
The biggest seed rounds in history landed in AI this year. Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, raised $2 billion. Advanced Machine Intelligence, cofounded by Yann LeCun, announced a $1.03 billion seed round in March. Both are backed by investors on the Seed 100 list — including Walter Kortschak’s Firestreak Ventures, which also invested in OpenAI and Anthropic. These rounds dwarf virtually anything in crypto, and they signal where the bulk of early-stage capital is flowing right now.
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Crypto crossover players
Kortschak is the clearest link between the AI frenzy and crypto. Firestreak Ventures invested in Polymarket, the prediction market platform last valued at $9 billion. That’s one of the few crypto names on the list. Other Seed 100 investors like Ann Miura-Ko (Floodgate) have backed Lyft, Twitter, and Okta — no crypto exposure. Lynne Chou O’Keefe (Define Ventures) focuses on health tech. Yun-Fang Juan (Brighter Capital) came from Facebook. Jesse Robbins (Heavybit) cofounded Chef, which sold for over $220 million. The pattern is clear: AI is the priority, but a few investors are placing parallel bets on decentralized markets.
What the list says about crypto’s place
It’s worth noting the list data is from 2024-2025. That means the sentiment captured is at least a year old. Since then, regulatory clarity like FIT21 and ETF approvals may have nudged some VCs back toward crypto. Still, the sheer size of the AI seed rounds — $2 billion, $1.03 billion — makes it hard to argue that crypto is a top priority for this crowd. Polymarket’s $9 billion valuation is a bright spot, but it’s an outlier. The more telling signal may come from Kortschak’s crossover strategy: betting on both AI labs and a crypto prediction market hints at a convergence thesis — where decentralized compute and verification become essential for AI infrastructure.
The full Seed 100 and Seed 40 lists are live on Business Insider. For crypto traders and builders, the immediate lesson is not that VCs have given up on the space — but that they’re being deeply selective. The next wave of funding may flow to projects that bridge AI and crypto, not pure speculation.
