VC Co-Investment Network: 303k Investor Pairs

Key findings

1. 303,421 investor pairs co-invested at least once across 42,182 rounds with two or more named organisation investors (65% of rounds with any), January 2019 to June 2026. 50,836 pairs (17%) did so two or more times and 829 ten or more times.
2. The strongest pair is Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global, with 87 shared rounds; next are Soma Capital and Y Combinator (84) and Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital (72).
3. Y Combinator has the widest network: it shared a round with 1,738 different investors. Tiger Global (1,480) and Gaingels (1,404) follow.
4. Syndicates grew in the 2021 boom. The average number of named organisation investors per round was 2.72 in 2019, 3.21 in 2021, 2.93 in 2023, 3.13 in 2025.
5. Like backs like. 64% of pairs join two investors of the same type; VC–VC pairs are 60% of all pairs, VC–CVC 8% and VC–PE 9%.

Strongest co-investor pairs worldwide (top 50)

Rounds both investors joined, January 2019 to June 2026, full data.

Most connected investors (top 50 by number of co-investors)

Co-investors = distinct investors it shared at least one round with.

Strongest co-investor pairs in US startups (top 30)

Rounds raised by companies based in United States.

Strongest co-investor pairs in UK startups (top 30)

Rounds raised by companies based in United Kingdom.

Strongest co-investor pairs in Indian startups (top 30)

Rounds raised by companies based in India.

Co-investment by investor headquarters country pair (top 30)

Only pairs where both investors have a known headquarters.

Co-investment by sector (top 25 sectors)

Share syndicated = rounds with two or more named organisation investors.

Co-investment by investor type pair

Syndication by year

Column dictionary

14 columns in the sample CSV.

Method

1. Rounds and investors. The same cleaned rounds and the same organisation-only investor list as the VC investor directory release: January 2019 to June 2026, people, generic phrases ("angel investors", "existing investors") and data providers removed, aliases merged (a16z = Andreessen Horowitz). Two archive back-fill days (2024-04-22 and 2025-02-13) are excluded.
2. Same family. Pairs of a firm and its own regional arm or fund vehicle (Sequoia Capital + Sequoia Capital India, Softbank + SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Goldman Sachs + Goldman Sachs Alternatives) are removed: news often names both for one cheque.
3. Edges. Every unordered pair of distinct investor organisations named in the same round is an edge; shared_deals counts the rounds. The pair is written in alphabetical order of the names, so each pair appears once.
4. Sector and country. top_shared_sector and top_shared_country are the most frequent sector and company country across the shared rounds.
5. Types. The investor types come from the directory release (rule-based: VC, CVC, PE, accelerator, bank-debt, government, other).

6. Sample. Pairs are sampled whole by a hash of the pair; an investor's edges are therefore spread across the sample, not kept together. Degree and other network measures in the report are computed on the full edge list.

7. Sample. Each pair key is ranked by sha1(key). Keys are taken in rank order until the file holds max(25%, 5,000) rows (capped at 100,000).

8. Profile links. Links are built from Fliar's company index and checked against it. A row whose company has no public profile has an empty link.

Limitations

• Built from news: rounds that were never reported are missing, and reports often name only some of the investors, so weak ties are under-counted.
• An edge means the two investors were named in the same round, not that they negotiated together.
• Investor names come from article text; a few aliases stay split, which splits their edges too.
• Because the sample is a random 25% of edges, network measures computed on the sample (degree, centrality) are lower than on the full graph.
• 2026 covers January to June only.

Cite this dataset

@misc{fliarbi_investor_coinvestment_network_2026,
  author    = {{Fliar BI}},
  title     = {{VC Co-Investment Network: 303k Investor Pairs}},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Fliar BI},
  url       = {https://fliarbi.com/datasets/investor-coinvestment-network/},
  note      = {Sample release. Licence CC BY-NC 4.0}
}