In venture capital, the biggest fortunes are rarely made once a trend becomes obvious. By the time dozens of firms are competing for allocations into OpenAI or Anthropic, the investors generating truly outsized returns have usually been in for years – often when the companies were still considered speculative, unproven or outright improbable.

That dynamic is defining the 2026 Midas List.

This year’s rankings reflect one of the largest concentrations of value creation the venture industry has ever seen. Artificial intelligence companies now account for a massive share of private market value, while defense technology, space infrastructure and AI-native applications have rapidly moved from fringe categories to the center of Silicon Valley.

Funding rounds across the AI stack, from foundation models and inference infrastructure to agentic software and autonomous systems, have become intensely oversubscribed. Multi-billion-dollar valuations that once seemed extraordinary are now common. Investors who established positions early in companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and Anduril are now seeing those bets affect their rankings.

But the pattern itself is not new.

In venture capital, conviction eventually becomes consensus—and consensus eventually becomes crowded. The investors climbing this year’s Midas List are the ones who moved before the crowd arrived.

Here are eight of the investors whose early bets helped define the current AI boom.

1. Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures (#1)

Key investments: OpenAI, Stripe, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Sword Health

When Vinod Khosla invested $50 million into OpenAI in 2019 at a roughly $1 billion valuation, it was the single largest initial investment he had made in more than four decades in venture capital.

At the time, OpenAI had little commercial infrastructure and no mass-market product. Today, that check is widely expected to become one of the most valuable early-stage investments in venture history.

The bet encapsulates Khosla’s long-standing philosophy: pursue technologies with asymmetric upside, even when the probability of failure appears uncomfortably high. Born in India and educated at IIT Delhi, Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, Khosla first rose to prominence at Kleiner Perkins before launching Khosla Ventures in 2004. His firm now manages roughly $15 billion and has become synonymous with high-risk, frontier-oriented investing.

Khosla has often described his strategy as backing “black swan” technologies – companies capable of fundamentally reshaping industries if they succeed. That thesis runs throughout his portfolio.

Years before fusion energy became fashionable, Khosla backed Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ $115 million Series A in 2019. He has also aggressively pursued AI applications in healthcare, including leading Sword Health’s $17 million Series A in 2020. The company is now valued at roughly $4 billion.

For Khosla, the objective has never been incremental improvement. He aims for technological transformation.

2. Elad Gil, Gil & Co. (#6)

Key investments: OpenAI, Perplexity AI, Cognition, Harvey

Few investors moved into generative AI earlier – or more aggressively – than Elad Gil. A former executive at Google and X, Gil began focusing heavily on large language models around 2020 after seeing the leap in capabilities demonstrated by GPT-3. Long before ChatGPT made generative AI mainstream, Gil was quietly assembling positions across nearly every layer of the emerging ecosystem.

He invested in OpenAI before the company had meaningful commercial traction. As the market evolved, he shifted aggressively into applications.

Gil co-led Perplexity AI’s $3.1 million seed round in 2022, before the company had established itself as one of the fastest-growing AI search platforms in the world. He also became an early and consistent backer of Cognition, creator of the AI software engineer Devin, participating in every financing round since the company’s Series A in 2024.

His portfolio now spans legal AI, healthcare AI, infrastructure and developer tooling, reflecting a broader thesis that value creation in artificial intelligence would increasingly migrate from the foundation models themselves toward application-layer businesses built on top of them. That is now playing out in real time.

3. Trae Stephens, Founders Fund (#7)

Key investments: Anduril, OpenAI, Flock Safety, Gecko Robotics

Trae Stephens has been a first-mover in defense tech since before he became an investor. He was an early employee at Palantir, where he led teams focused on growth in intelligence and space products and spearheaded international expansion.

Stephens joined Founders Fund in 2014. A few years later, he co-founded Anduril alongside Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. Their thesis was simple: modern software and autonomous systems could radically modernize defense infrastructure.

While it was far from a mainstream idea at the time, today, defense tech has become one of venture capital’s hottest categories – and Anduril is among the most valuable private defense companies in the world.

Founders Fund first backed the company at the seed stage and continued investing through its 2025 financing, when the firm wrote a $1 billion check at a $30.5 billion valuation.

Stephens has made similar bets elsewhere across industrial and defense-oriented AI systems, including in Flock Safety, the AI-powered public safety platform. He also backed AI robotics company Gecko Robotics at the seed stage, last valued at $1.25 billion in its 2025 Series D, and was an early investor in OpenAI.

As geopolitical instability increasingly drives governments to ramp up defense tech spending worldwide, Stephens’ early conviction in frontier technology is delivering results.

4. Mamoon Hamid, Kleiner Perkins (#12)

Key investments: Glean, Applied Intuition, Alif Semiconductor, Retym

Mamoon Hamid has spent much of the last decade rebuilding Kleiner Perkins around disciplined early-stage investing.

Born in Pakistan and raised in Germany, Hamid studied engineering at Purdue before earning graduate degrees from Stanford and Harvard. After co-founding Social Capital, he joined Kleiner Perkins in 2017 and helped reshape the firm with a more concentrated, process-driven approach to investing.

That rigor is visible throughout Hamid’s AI portfolio.

While many investors focused primarily on applications, Hamid spread bets across the full AI stack – from enterprise software to semiconductors and networking infrastructure. He backed Alif Semiconductor, which designs ultra-low-power AI inference chips, and led Kleiner’s early investment in Retym, a startup building networking silicon for AI data centers before the company publicly emerged from stealth.

One of his most notable investments is Glean, the enterprise AI search company that spent roughly 18 months incubating inside Kleiner Perkins’ offices before formally launching. The company has since grown into one of the most closely watched AI productivity startups in enterprise software.

Hamid’s portfolio reflects a broader realization increasingly shaping venture markets: the AI boom is creating massive value not only at the application layer, but throughout the infrastructure underpinning it.

5. Yasmin Razavi, Spark Capital (#13)

Key investments: Anthropic, Deel, Kalshi, Marqeta

Yasmin Razavi is a newcomer on the 2026 Midas List, and one of the clearest examples of how AI investing is producing a new generation of top-tier venture investors.

Born in Tehran and educated as an engineer before earning an MBA from Harvard Business School, Razavi has built an unusually hybrid career spanning consulting, product management and investing. Before joining Spark Capital, she worked at McKinsey, Snap and Index Ventures.

That operating experience helped shape an investment style grounded less in instinct and more in preparation.

Razavi has described her approach as developing a “prepared mind,” spending months studying markets before companies emerge, allowing her to move decisively once the right opportunity appears.

That framework helped lead her to Anthropic.

Razavi led Spark’s investment in Anthropic’s $450 million Series C in 2023 and joined the company’s board while the business was still early in its commercialization. Anthropic has since become one of the most valuable private AI companies in the world, helping launch Razavi into the list’s top 15, a rarity for a newcomer.

She also backed Deel at an early stage, when the company had less than $1 million in annual revenue. Deel has since grown into a global payroll infrastructure giant valued at $17.3 billion.

6. Hemant Taneja, General Catalyst (#19)

Key investments: Stripe, Anthropic, Canva, Livongo, Hippocratic AI

Hemant Taneja has spent more than two decades building one of venture capital’s broadest portfolios across healthcare, fintech, AI and enterprise software. But what distinguishes Taneja from many of his peers is not simply the size of his investments – it is the depth of operational involvement behind them.

Born in Delhi and educated at MIT, where he earned degrees spanning engineering, biology and mathematics, Taneja approaches investing with an academic intensity that has become central to General Catalyst’s strategy.

He was an early backer of Stripe and continued investing through more than a dozen financing rounds, eventually committing billions into the company. He has also aggressively expanded into frontier AI, backing companies including Hippocratic AI, Mistral AI and defense startup Helsing.

At the same time, Taneja has increasingly pushed beyond traditional venture investing into company formation and operational transformation.

General Catalyst helped launch Livongo before its eventual $18.5 billion merger with Teladoc. More recently, he helped launch and back Long Lake, an AI-powered property management platform that has raised over $600 million in capital since incubation.

7. Shaun Maguire, Sequoia (#22)

Key investments: SpaceX, xAI, Safe Superintelligence, Decart

Few investors climbed faster on this year’s Midas List than Shaun Maguire.

The Sequoia partner jumped 64 spots, propelled largely by early and concentrated positions in SpaceX and xAI – two of the companies most responsible for this year’s surge in private-market value concentration.

Maguire calls many of these investments “atoms” companies: businesses building foundational infrastructure across space, defense and frontier technology.

The framework reflects his own background. After earning a PhD in physics from Caltech focused on quantum gravity, Maguire worked at DARPA before co-founding cybersecurity company Expanse, which Palo Alto Networks acquired for more than $1 billion in 2020. At Sequoia, he has aggressively pursued frontier technologies that many traditional software investors once considered too capital intensive or speculative.

Maguire has emerged as one of Sequoia’s key investors in Elon Musk’s ecosystem, leading or co-leading investments in SpaceX, xAI, X and The Boring Company. He also backed Safe Superintelligence, the AI safety company founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, at its Series A in 2024.

Less than a year later, the company raised capital at a $32 billion valuation despite remaining pre-product – a reflection of just how aggressively investors are now pricing perceived leadership in frontier AI.

8. Randy Glein, DFJ Growth (#23)

Key investments: SpaceX, Anduril, Vannevar Labs, Commonwealth Fusion Systems

Long before “frontier tech” became Silicon Valley’s dominant narrative, Randy Glein was investing in aerospace, national security and advanced energy systems.

An engineer by training, Glein began his career at Hughes Space and Communications before co-founding DFJ Growth in 2005 alongside Barry Schuler. Their thesis was that transformational technology companies would remain private far longer than previous generations and would therefore require growth-stage investors willing to support them at scale.

That thesis positioned the firm to invest early in some of today’s most valuable private companies.

Glein led DFJ Growth’s first investment into SpaceX in 2009, before Falcon 9 had successfully launched humans into orbit. He later backed xAI at its Series B and he led DFJ Growth’s investment in Vannevar Labs’ $75 million Series B to help the company build agentic AI for national security missions at a roughly $575 million valuation.

He also invested heavily into energy infrastructure through Commonwealth Fusion Systems, reflecting another increasingly important frontier theme: the enormous power demands required to sustain the AI economy.

As AI, energy and defense become more intertwined, Glein’s portfolio increasingly looks less like a collection of separate bets and more like a coordinated thesis on the next industrial era.