For 25 years, the Forbes Midas List has tracked the venture investors generating the largest returns in venture capital.
Across multiple technology eras, a relatively small group of startups has generated an outsized share of those returns. They became recurring engines of Midas performance, helping define generations of elite venture capitalists. These all-time leaders map the evolution of the tech industry itself.
Alibaba, Meta and Google defined the internet era. Stripe and Databricks built the infrastructure layer for digital commerce and enterprise software. Now OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX are reshaping venture around artificial intelligence, compute and frontier technology.
At the same time, the structure of venture capital has fundamentally changed.
Earlier generations of Midas-defining companies often went public relatively early in their growth cycles. Today’s biggest startups are staying private longer, raising unprecedented amounts of capital and creating enormous paper fortunes before public investors gain access.
The result is a historical leaderboard that captures not just startup success stories, but the companies that most reshaped venture capital itself.
1. SpaceX
SpaceX has influenced venture capital more dramatically than almost any private company of the modern era.
Founded in 2002, Elon Musk’s aerospace company transformed from a risky rocket startup into one of the most valuable private companies in history. It proved that venture-backed firms could succeed in industries long dominated by governments and defense contractors, challenging the longstanding belief that VC should avoid capital-intensive businesses.
SpaceX normalized the idea that startups could remain private at extraordinary scale. Its dominance in launches, reusable rockets and satellite infrastructure helped create a new category of venture-backed business. Starlink expanded that vision further, turning SpaceX into a recurring-revenue communications platform with global reach.
The company also became one of the defining ownership assets in modern venture history. Early backers including Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek of Founders Fund, Steve Jurvetson of DFJ and then TK and Antonio Gracias of Valor Equity Partners helped turn SpaceX into one of the most consequential investments ever tied to the Midas List. Investors who secured early stakes and maintained them through years of private-market appreciation generated some of the largest gains the industry has ever seen – and they’re set to see even more with the company’s plans to go public in June.
2. OpenAI
Few companies have concentrated as much value creation into as short a period of time as OpenAI.
Founded as a research lab in 2015, the company became the defining commercial force of the generative AI era after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022.
Rather than traditional applications, the company positioned large language models as a new computing layer capable of reshaping search, productivity, coding and much of knowledge work itself.
That vision triggered one of the largest capital cycles in venture history. Microsoft’s investment became one of Silicon Valley’s most consequential strategic partnerships, while subsequent financings pushed OpenAI into valuation territory once reserved for the world’s largest public companies.
The company also accelerated a broader shift toward extreme concentration inside venture capital. Access to OpenAI became one of the industry’s most valuable relationships, rewarding the investors who secured early ownership before AI became the dominant theme in global technology markets. Investors including Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, Trae Stephens of Founders Fund, Ronny Conway of A.Capital and Randy Glein and Sam Fort of DFJ Growth became some of the biggest beneficiaries of OpenAI’s meteoric rise.
3. ByteDance
ByteDance became one of the world’s most influential consumer technology companies by mastering algorithmic entertainment distribution at global scale.
TikTok transformed social media from a network built around friends and followers into one driven by recommendation systems and machine learning in a shift that rewired the internet.
Meta, YouTube and nearly every major consumer platform eventually redesigned products around the short-form video feeds pioneered by ByteDance.
The company also became one of the most important examples of Chinese venture-backed value creation. For investors including Neil Shen of HSG (previously Sequoia China) and Thomas Laffont of Coatue, ByteDance generated returns rivaling Silicon Valley’s legendary outcomes while proving Chinese internet companies could achieve enormous global cultural influence.
At the same time, TikTok’s rise highlighted the growing intersection of technology, geopolitics and regulation as U.S. lawmakers increasingly scrutinized the platform’s ownership and data practices. After a law required ByteDance to divest its U.S. operations or face a ban, the Chinese parent company sold most of its stake to a group of investors in January.
4. Anthropic
Anthropic became one of the fastest-rising companies in venture history by positioning itself as both a frontier AI lab and an enterprise software platform.
Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, the company initially differentiated itself through an emphasis on AI safety and alignment.
But its commercial acceleration surprised even bullish investors. Claude rapidly gained traction among enterprises seeking reliable AI systems for coding, customer support and workflow automation. Anthropic’s partnerships with Amazon and Google also gave it unusual strategic leverage in the escalating AI infrastructure race.
The company helped convince investors that generative AI could support multiple mega-platform winners rather than a single dominant company. That possibility reshaped venture behavior across the industry, accelerating investment into frontier-model developers, infrastructure providers and AI applications. Its rapid ascent helped propel investors including Yasmin Razavi of Spark Capital, Ravi Mhatre of Lightspeed Venture Partners and Matt Murphy of Menlo Ventures higher on the Midas rankings.
5. xAI
Founded by Elon Musk in 2023, xAI rapidly became one of the market’s most closely watched artificial intelligence startups, fueled by Musk’s reputation, access to massive computing infrastructure and deep integration with X.
Its chatbot, Grok, gave xAI something many AI startups lacked: immediate distribution to hundreds of millions of users. That positioning helped investors view the company not simply as another model developer, but as a broader AI platform spanning consumer products, media and infrastructure.
xAI’s rise also reflected a larger shift inside venture capital. Investors increasingly rewarded strategic positioning in AI long before traditional financial metrics matured, driving valuations higher at unprecedented speed. Investors including Shaun Maguire of Sequoia, David George of Andreessen Horowitz and Saurabh Gupta of DST Global moved aggressively to secure exposure as the company rapidly became one of AI’s most valuable startups.
The company’s eventual merger with SpaceX further reinforced the increasingly blurred boundaries between AI, communications, industrial technology and media ecosystems in the modern venture landscape.
6. Alibaba
Alibaba is one of the defining companies of the globalization era.
Founded by Jack Ma in 1999, the ecommerce giant became a cornerstone of China’s internet economy while introducing global investors to the scale of Chinese technology markets.
Its 2014 IPO was a watershed moment for venture capital. At roughly $25 billion, it was the world’s largest public offering at the time and generated extraordinary returns for early investors including SoftBank and Yahoo.
Alibaba also helped establish an entire generation of China-focused venture and growth investors. The company demonstrated that Chinese startups could rival or surpass the scale of America’s largest internet platforms. Its expansion into cloud computing, logistics and payments further reinforced the idea that major technology ecosystems could emerge outside Silicon Valley.
Although later regulatory crackdowns reshaped China’s tech sector, Alibaba’s impact on venture history remains foundational.
7. Stripe
Stripe has become one of venture capital’s clearest examples of durable, compounding execution.
Founded by Patrick and John Collison in 2010, the company simplified online payments infrastructure at a moment when internet commerce was rapidly expanding.
Its core insight was deceptively simple: make accepting payments as easy as adding a few lines of code. That simplicity helped Stripe become deeply embedded across the modern internet economy.
Over time, the company expanded into billing, fraud prevention, treasury services and embedded finance, evolving into a financial operating system for startups and enterprises alike.
Unlike many highly valued private companies, Stripe also developed a reputation for operational discipline and relatively consistent investor confidence across market cycles. Its influence on the Midas List extends across multiple generations of investors including Peter Thiel of Founders Fund, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst and Michael Moritz of Sequoia.
8. Databricks
Databricks became one of the most important infrastructure companies of the AI era by helping enterprises organize and operationalize data at scale.
Founded by the creators of Apache Spark, the company initially focused on analytics and data engineering before evolving into a broader AI infrastructure platform.
As generative AI adoption accelerated, Databricks found itself positioned directly inside one of the most valuable layers of the technology stack. Companies needed centralized systems to store data, train models and deploy AI applications internally. Databricks increasingly became that connective layer.
Investors including Ben Horowitz and David George of Andreessen Horowitz, Dharmesh Thakker of Battery Ventures and Pete Sonsini of Laude Ventures became major beneficiaries as the company evolved into one of AI’s most important infrastructure platforms.
9. Google
Google is the foundational company of the modern internet economy—and one of the most important investments in venture capital history.
Founded in 1998, the company transformed internet search from a chaotic directory system into one of the most powerful and profitable business models ever created. Its PageRank algorithm fundamentally changed how information was organized online while creating the economic engine that would come to dominate digital advertising for decades.
Google also helped establish many of the core assumptions underlying modern venture capital. The company demonstrated that software businesses built around network effects, data advantages and massive scale could achieve extraordinary profitability while expanding globally at unprecedented speed.
Its 2004 IPO became one of Silicon Valley’s defining liquidity events, generating enormous returns for early investors including Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. The investment helped solidify both firms as defining power centers of the internet era.
More than almost any company of its era, Google shaped both how the internet works and how venture capital evaluates transformational technology businesses.
10. Meta
No company has shaped the economics and scale of social media more profoundly than Facebook, now Meta.
The company transformed social networking from a college-campus product into one of the dominant businesses of the internet age.
Facebook also became the archetype for modern venture-backed hypergrowth. Its ability to scale globally at extraordinary speed reshaped investor expectations around network effects, engagement and winner-take-all consumer platforms.
The company’s 2012 IPO marked a defining moment for Silicon Valley. Despite early skepticism after a difficult public debut, Facebook evolved into one of the world’s most profitable advertising businesses, generating enormous returns for investors including Jim Breyer of Accel, Peter Thiel (through both personal investments and Founders Fund), Reid Hoffman of Greylock and Yuri Milner of DST Global while helping define an entire generation of consumer-internet investing.
Meta’s influence extends well beyond financial outcomes. The company transformed digital advertising, helped create the modern creator economy and established social platforms as global communications infrastructure.
