The long freeze for initial public offerings and mergers appears to be thawing and in one corner of the startup market, deals are running white-hot. In 2025, a small cohort of mega startups like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Stripe now command super-sized valuations, rarely seen for private companies. And their earliest backers are now surging ahead in the Midas List, Forbes’ ranking of the world’s top venture capitalists.
Produced in partnership with TrueBridge Capital Partners, the 24th annual Midas List is again topped by Alfred Lin. While the Sequoia investor continues to reap the benefits of early bets on Airbnb and Doordash, which both went public in 2020, a 2021 investment in OpenAI at a $14 billion valuation now adds to his staying power. The ChatGPT-maker is currently valued at $300 billion after raising a $40 billion round in April, a new record for the most money raised by a private startup.
It’s not just OpenAI. The surging valuations of startups like SpaceX, Databricks and Anthropic accounts for eight of the 15 newcomers joining this year’s Midas List. Investors Shaun Maguire of Sequoia and Craft Ventures’ David Sacks have broken into the list for the first time largely thanks to bets on Elon Musk’s projects, notably SpaceX, now the world’s most valuable private company after raising earlier this year at $350 billion.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/lists/midas/
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