Methodology

VCRank ranks crypto venture investors by what they actually did in funding rounds: who led, who followed, and how much capital they led. This page describes the rules behind the table. The same rules apply to every investor, and the table is only as good as these rules.

What counts as a round

A round enters the database when a specific company has announced a specific financing and at least one investor is named.

• Included: pre-seed, seed and Series A to F venture rounds; strategic rounds; private token rounds (SAFTs and private sales). Treasury placements with named investors are included and treated as strategic.
• Excluded: rounds that are only "in talks" or reported as upcoming (they enter when they close); purchases of shares from existing shareholders, where the money goes to the seller and not into the company; sales of new shares into the open market, such as at-the-market programs, where the buyer is the anonymous public market and no investor is named; public token sales and ICOs; venture funds raising their own funds; nonprofit donations and grants; political spending and M&A.

An investor ends up holding part of the company either way, so the test is not who owns what afterwards. It is where the money went: a round funds the company by issuing new shares or tokens, while buying a stake pays the shareholder who is selling. The wording of a headline does not settle it, because "acquires a stake" is used for both; what settles it is whether the shares are newly issued. When a deal carries the marks of a sale, we read it again with that single question in mind, and it enters the table only if the money went into the company; a deal the sources leave ambiguous stays out.

Money added to a round that is already in the table does not open a second row. When a company tops up a raise it has already announced, or an investor announces its own cheque into that raise, or a regulatory filing reports the cumulative amount sold in the same offering, all of it belongs to the round that is already recorded: the investors are added to it, and the amount is raised to the round’s new total when a source states that total in so many words. A figure that covers the company’s whole history, a valuation, a regulatory filing’s running tally, or a sum that folds in debt is not that total and does not move the number. A later raise under its own name is a different matter. Seed, Series A, Series B and Series C are separate rounds even when they are weeks apart and share investors, because each one is money raised again.

Which of the two a report describes is decided by reading it, not by how far the amounts sit apart. A single investor's cheque is smaller than the round it belongs to and a filing total is larger than the round it covers, so the size of the gap says nothing on its own. Where the sources leave it ambiguous, the report is set aside for a person to read rather than resolved by a rule.

Which companies count as crypto

The table covers crypto venture, so a round only enters when the company itself belongs to crypto. That is judged from what the company builds, not from the outlet that covered the round and not from who invested: a crypto fund backing an ordinary software company does not make that company crypto.

• Inside: crypto, blockchain and web3 companies; digital assets, stablecoins and tokenization; trading, custody, mining and infrastructure; prediction markets; any company that issues its own token, whatever else it sells; and any company that builds or operates crypto payment rails, including one that settles in stablecoins alongside cards and bank transfers.
• Outside: companies whose product neither runs on crypto nor is built for crypto users. Taking crypto as a way to pay for an unrelated product does not count: a travel site or a shop that accepts stablecoins is not a crypto company. Neither does selling to the industry: a vendor of identity checks, cloud hosting or payroll whose customer list includes exchanges and prediction markets is outside, because the test is what the company builds and not who buys it.

The check reads the company's own website rather than the article about the round, because an article describes an event while the question is about the business. Where the site cannot be read, which happens when a site asks crawlers to stay out, the check falls back to what other publications write about the company, and where even that is missing the round is left in place rather than dropped on a guess.

Round status

A round enters the table only once it is reported as a fact that has happened. Rounds described as being in talks, planned or expected do not count. Neither do raises carried only in hedged language, such as a figure attributed to another outlet's reporting that the company has not confirmed. Those enter the table if and when they are confirmed.

Keeping a record of unconfirmed raises, so that a round can be dated from the first time it surfaced, is planned and not live yet.

The table does not yet separate rounds confirmed by the company from rounds reported by media alone. That distinction is planned and will be shown per round once it is live.

Lead and follow

Roles are assigned from the explicit wording of the announcement, never inferred. A lead credit is only recorded together with the sentence that establishes it, and that sentence is shown on the round page. Where no source states who led, the round is marked as having no lead disclosed rather than being given one.

The wording is read from the round's own sources, and a source that only republishes another outlet's report cannot introduce a lead that the primary coverage does not state.

Wording in the source	Role assigned
"led by X", "X led the round"	lead
"co-led by X and Y"	both lead
"sole investor", "solo round"	lead
"with participation from", "backed by", "investors include"	participant
"anchored by X"	participant
no lead named in any source	all participants; round marked "no lead disclosed"

An investor never gets lead credit for simply appearing in a round. Every round links back to the public source its attribution came from. For a handful of early records the verbatim sentence is still being collected from their sources, and the round page says so in place of a quote until it is found.

How the table counts

• Ordering. The table is ordered by capital led. Rounds led and total deals break ties between equal amounts.
• Deals led is the number of rounds where the investor was a lead. Each co-lead counts the round once.
• Capital led credits the full round size to each lead. Co-led rounds are credited in full to every co-lead, the standard convention in league tables, so column totals can exceed the sum of the underlying rounds.
• Rounds with an undisclosed size count toward deal counts and are excluded from capital sums.
• Participation is tracked separately and is never mixed into lead statistics. Funds that have not led a tracked round are listed outside the ranking.

Dates and periods

Rounds are dated by announcement date, since closing dates are rarely disclosed in crypto. The date is read from the coverage itself, and where sources disagree the earliest one wins: an outlet can report a round days or months after it was announced, but it cannot report it before. A date is only taken from an article that reports this round; a story about a later tranche or an earlier raise by the same company dates its own event, not this one.

The Month and Quarter views are rolling windows of 30 and 90 days ending today. The Year view is the current calendar year, 1 January to today. Rounds without a reliable date are excluded from period tables.

Investor names

The same fund appears in the press under different names. Names are resolved to one canonical entity before anything is counted: for example "a16z", "a16z crypto" and "Andreessen Horowitz" are one investor. Ambiguous matches are reviewed by a person and are never merged automatically.

When a round first enters the table, the coverage found for it is read together rather than one article at a time, so that an investor written two ways in two articles is recorded once. This matters most for the writings that no comparison of spelling would catch, such as a person named by name in one article and by handle in another. Coverage that appears after the round is already recorded is still merged into it one article at a time.

Sources and verification

Data is extracted from public funding announcements and crypto news coverage. Every round carries links to all the public sources it was built from, and every one of them is listed on the round page.

Where several sources cover the same round, they are reconciled into a single record rather than counted twice. Investor lists are combined, because an outlet naming fewer investors is not evidence that the others were absent. A lead credit stands once a source states it in the wording above, and it is not removed by a later source that stays silent on who led. Sources that only republish another outlet's report cannot establish one. The round is dated by the earliest announcement found, since a feed can publish an item weeks after the company announced it. Where sources disagree on the size of the round, the figure from the company's own announcement or its regulatory filing wins. Where no such statement exists and the figures still differ, the record keeps the first figure and the conflict is held for review.

A per-round verification level based on independent corroboration is planned and not live yet.

Currency

Amounts are recorded as the source states them, in the currency the source uses, and that figure is shown on every round page. For the table they are converted to US dollars at the European Central Bank reference rate for the announcement date, and both the rate and the date it came from are kept with the round, so any figure can be checked.

Conversion happens once, when the round is recorded. Later movements in the exchange rate do not change a past round. Where a rate is unavailable the amount stays in its original currency, is shown that way, and is left out of the capital column rather than counted as dollars.

People in the table

Most entries are firms. A few are individuals, because the announcement named a person rather than a fund, and we record what the announcement said.

What we publish about a person is limited to one thing: what they did in a funding round that was publicly announced. The company, the size as reported, the role, the sentence that established it, and a link to the announcement the record came from. Nothing about private life, and nothing the source did not state. Every record names its source, so anyone can check what was taken and where it came from.

We publish this because who finances an industry is a matter of public record and public interest, and the underlying announcements are already public. The rules on this page apply to a person exactly as they apply to a firm, and no role is ever inferred.

Corrections and objections go to contact@vcrank.org. A record that is factually wrong gets corrected, and an announcement showing the correct facts is the fastest way to get that done. A request to remove an accurate, sourced record of professional activity gets read and answered rather than processed by rule, and the default answer is that the record stays.

Coverage

Systematic coverage begins in mid-2026 and moves forward from there. Earlier rounds appear only where a current source references them, so the archive before that point is not complete. Funds, corporate investors and angels are currently ranked in one table; segmentation by investor type is planned.

Revisions

Rows are revised when better sources appear, and revisions keep their source links.