The Top Venture Capital Investors By Exit Activity – Which Firms See the Highest Share of IPOs?

With the venture-backed IPO market hitting its stride in both the healthcare and tech sectors, we wanted to take a look back and see which VCs have had the most exits over the last five years and how do these exits break down between acquisitions (M&A) and IPOs.

Top Venture Capital Investors By Number of Exits Since 2009

There are 22 corporate venture or venture capital investors who have recorded 40 or more M&A/IPO exits since the start of 2009. Intel Capital tops the list with over 100 exits in the period.

It’s also not surprising to see a slew of mega-funds round out the top 5 including Accel Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital (which has gotten in early to a slew of home run exits including WhatsApp and LinkedIn over the period).

Perhaps more surprising is that smaller VC funds (aka Micro VCs) including First Round Capital, SV Angel and Felicis Ventures make it onto this list.  While micro VC funds are clearly of varying quality, these are clearly a few of the elite ones.

IPO versus M&A

When we analyze each investor by looking at IPO versus M&A exits, we see NEA and Venrock on top, each with over 1/4 of their exits during the period occurring via IPO. Mega VCs Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Greylock as well as “coattail” fund DAG Ventures which co-invests in later stage financings saw nearly 1/4 of their exits come through the public markets.

Given fund arithmetic, micro VCs can see strong returns with more modest exits and so don’t necessarily require IPOs.  And so as might be expected, the micro VCs on the list, SV Angel, Felicis Ventures and First Round Capital, generally see a higher share of M&A exits.  Of course, this doesn’t mean those M&A exits are necessarily small.  As an example, Felicis saw portfolio company Meraki get acquired by Cisco for $1.2 billion and fellow portfolio company The Climate Corporation get snapped up by Monsanto for $930 million in cash.

For more investor financing and exit data and interactive rankings, check out the CB Insights Venture Capital Database. Sign up for free below.