The 60 top angel investors that back B2B startups
- Angel investors are vital to enterprise startups, but often work quietly behind the scenes.
- Data around individual investors in early startups is often very incomplete.
- Now with the help of Wing VC, BI is identifying 60 of the top B2B angel investors.
Angel investors are vital to enterprise startups, writing the first checks to try to grow the kernel of an idea into the next Salesforce or Oracle. However, they often work quietly behind the scenes, attracting less attention than those who back flashier consumer companies.
With the help of Wing VC, a Palo Alto-based early-stage firm focused on enterprise startups, Business Insider is identifying 60 of the top angel investors who invest in business-to-business startups.
To compile the data, Wing worked backward, surveying over 100 of the leading VCs and corporate development executives to identify the top enterprise startups. Once it whittled down the list, Wing set out to discover the angels who were among the earliest investors in those companies.
"One thing we struggled with is that data around the individual investors in a company is really incomplete," said Peter Wagner, founding partner of Wing. "So we had to go and hit a wide range of data sources and proactively reach out to the individuals to make sure we're being comprehensive."
By and large, Wing found the top angels are still very active in their full-time day jobs, running their own companies like Figma and Datadog.
"These aren't old retired guys," Wagner said. "These are people that are typically still helping lead their company. And then while they're doing that, they're mentoring the next generation."
It is worth noting that the list of top companies is subjective and Wing also did not examine the angels' returns, how much they invested, or at what price. But in tech, being early offers the biggest risk but also the largest rewards.
Notable investments: Dust, Hugging Face, Pinecone
Pomel cofounded Datadog in 2010. The company, which provides observability services for cloud-scale applications, went public in 2019. Previously, Pomel was an executive at Wireless Generation, which was acquired by News Corp. As an angel investor, Pomel has invested in close to 60 companies, according to Pitchbook.
Notable investments: BetterUp, CRED, Deel, Faire, Figma, and Truebill.
Rajaram now focuses on investing full-time after leaving his role as a product executive at Doordash in April. He has been a prolific angel in companies like Deel and Figma and also serves on the boards of Coinbase, Pinterest, and The Trade Desk.
"I focus a lot on founder-market fit," Rajaram told BI. "Why should this founder tackle this problem? What non-obvious insights do they have about their target customers, and how authentic are these insights?"
Notable investments: BRINC, Cradle, Kindred, Protocol Labs, Socket, Warp
Field cofounded Figma, a collaborative web application for interface design, in 2012. Adobe tried to buy the company for $20 billion but the deal fell apart last year amidst regulatory scrutiny. Asked what he looks for as an angel investor, Field replied: "An A+++++ team."
Notable investments: Pinterest, Uber, Warby Parker, Airtable, Ramp, Mercury, Periscope, KoBold
Belsky, who describes himself as "design obsessive," leads corporate strategy and development at Adobe, where he was previously chief product officer, leading development of all Creative Cloud products. He has also been an investor at Benchmark.
Belsky says he looks for "founders that are deep learners, with a deep value for design, making something the world needs."
Notable investments: Rippling, Airtable, Deel and Substack
Akhund is CEO of Mercury, which provides banking for startups. As an angel investor, he has backed more than 350 companies.
"I look for startups that I believe will become essential and unavoidable over the next decade," Akhund told BI. "The startup must have a clear path to scale and a market opportunity that can reach or exceed a $10 billion valuation."
Notable investments: Chainguard, Nightfall AI, Iterative Health, Pelotero
Kerrest cofounded Okta, an identity provider, in 2009, which later went public in 2017 and now has a market capitalization of around $15 billion.
As a frequent angel investor, Kerrest says he looks for people first and cares less about the actual product.
"Because I invest in early stage technology companies they don't have everything figured out," Kerrest told BI. "But if you have a great founding team and a big market, they will pivot and find something that works."
Notable investments: Zip, Whatnot, Stytch, Pachama, Captions, Farcaster, Daylight
Rachitsky's newsletter on product management boasts over half a million subscribers while his popular podcast brings in over $40,000 a month.
He has invested in more than 150 companies as an angel investor, including the first round of Zip, which is now valued at over a billion dollars. He says he looks for "A+ founders" who have speed, grit, commitment, and are "a little bit crazy."
Notable investments: Equals, Modal Labs, Replicate
Handy is CEO of dbt Labs, a cloud-based platform for data transformation, while moonlighting a highly successful angel investor. He says he takes a broad approach to investing, and wants to know every data and AI infrastructure founder.
"I have a ton of epistemic humility—I don't know where the future is headed!—and so instead my goal is to be long on an entire sector," Handy told BI. "Certainly there is a financial upside involved, but my main professional satisfaction comes from building communities, and helping out this next cohort of founders is an absolute joy."
Notable investments: The Browser Company, Figma, Irontool, Loom, Retool, Vanta
Mathilde Collin built a $1.7 billion email startup, Front, by the time she was 32. Along the way, she used her entrepreneurial expertise to invest in her fellow founders building software for enterprises. She tells BI she looks for "a rare combination of humility and self-confidence."
Notable investments: Airtable, Faire, Harvey.ai, Mercury, Ramp
Eric Wu knows firsthand the impact an angel investor can have early on. He got into investing to provide that same value to other founders. He tells BI he does "whatever it takes to help, whether it is sharing mistakes I made or sourcing candidates, and then get out of the way."
Notable investments: Coda, Magical, Miro, Notion, Pipe, Stripe
Des Traynor, whose 12-year-old startup, Intercom, makes software for customer service, considers himself a passive angel investor — cutting checks when he stumbles on a product he loves and when he can share something useful from his experience with the founder.
Notable investments: Drata, Fireworks AI, Miro, NinjaOne, Rubrik, 1Password
Frank Slootman stepped back at the Berkshire-backed Snowflake in February, which might free him up to invest in his fellow founders more than he already has. His portfolio includes some of the crown jewels of the security and compliance space, including Drata, NinjaOne, and Rubrik.
Notable investments: Perplexity, Postmates, Notion, Replit, Twitter, Uber, Yammer
Naval Ravikant is not only a serial angel investor, with over a hundred deals under his belt, but he's also credited with "blowing open" early-stage investing as the cofounder of AngelList, a site that lets startups raise money from angel investors and syndicates of small checkwriters.
Notable investments: Gusto, Mercury, Relativity Space, Superhuman, Carta, Airtable
Gomila stepped down as CEO of Golden, a Wikipedia for tech backed by a16z and Founders Fund, in March. He previously founded Heyzap, a mobile developer tools platform, that was acquired in 2016. As an angel investor, Gomila says he has backed 17 startups that have gone on to become unicorns.
"Many times I will think on a thesis for 10+ years before I come across the correct market timing to be the first cheque into the company," Gomila says on his website. "I have thousands of startups in my head that I'm either waiting for, seeking, shaping or in the case of Golden - building."
Notable investments: Canva, Merge, Meter, Notion, Stytch, WorkOS, Writer
Cristina Cordova has sat on both sides of the table as a builder, scaling tech behemoths like Stripe and Notion, and as a partner investing in early-stage startups at First Round Capital. She tells BI she backs "ambitious, technical founders" across developer tools, software, and fintech.
Notable investments: Svix, Stark, Feathery, Stellate
Warner is currently the cofounder and CEO of Poolside, an AI for software development that raised a $126 million seed round last year. Before founding Poolside, he spent two years as a managing director at Redpoint Ventures and was also the CTO of GitHub from 2017-2021.
Notable investments: Slack, Scale, Miro, Applied Intuition, Ramp
Horowitz spent 15 years at Google as VP of product and an advisor, leading teams that built products including Gmail, Google Docs, and Google News. He's been angel investing since 2007 and launched his venture fund, Wisdom Ventures, in 2023, which focuses on mindfulness and well-being startups.
Notable investments: Checkr, Mercury, Deel
Mullen is part of the founding team that created Instacart back in 2012. He lead the company's culture and experience teams, and in addition to building the company from conception to IPO, he's made more than 75 angel investments in recent years.
Notable investments: Mercury, Titan, Aside
Reeves co-founded Gusto in 2011 and is the workplace and HR platform's CEO. Gusto was most recently valued at $9.6 billion, according to Pitchbook. He's also invested in several SaaS and e-commerce startups over the last decade.
Notable investments: Stripe, Yelp, Brex, Unity Software, Wise, Evernote
In addition to running Affirm, the buy-now-pay-later startup valued at more than $9 billion, Levchin was a cofounder alongside Peter Thiel of the company that would become PayPal. Since then he's been one of the most prominent members of the so-called PayPal Mafia and a permanent fixture in Silicon Valley power player circles.
Notable investments: Quadratic, WarpStream, Chroma, Espresso AI
Kimball became an evangelist of the free software movement while still a student at Berkeley when he created the free, open-source Photoshop alternative GIMP.
After stints as a software engineer at Google and Square, Kimball helped create enterprise database company Cockroach Labs, which was most recently valued at more than $5 billion. In addition to running Cockroach, Kimball has become a prolific early-stage investor in database and productivity software startups.
Notable investments: Reddit, Instacart, Neuralink, Flexport, Helion
Long before becoming the leader of the world's most important AI company, Altman was a bona fide power broker in Silicon Valley.
Ever since his days running the legendary startup incubator Y Combinator, Altman's name on a cap table has been known to attract big-name investors and push up valuations. Now, he's using his personal fortune to build out an empire of moonshot startups designed to lay the ground for the coming AI revolution.
Notable investments: Quora, Casetext, Weights and Biases, Aardvark, BlueSky, Lambda
Hammerbacher ran the data team at Facebook and served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel before founding cloud-computing startup Cloudera, which went public in 2017. He now runs a boutique venture capital firm called Techammer alongside his wife and healthcare entrepreneur, Halle Tecco. They focus on "supporting founders working on meaningful problems."
Notable investments: Lambda, Gantry, Lumos, Roboflow
Brockman has long been part of Sam Altman's inner circle at OpenAI. Following last year's "attempted coup" that saw Altman briefly ousted and reinstated, Brockman publicly sided with Altman, and since then, Brockman's position within the AI giant has only become more indispensable. Like Altman, Brockman has leveraged his personal wealth to back an array of artificial intelligence and machine learning startups.
Notable investments: Runway, Superblocks, Mercury, Miro,
Liu got his start at the age of 20 when he created CRM startup Etacts, which raised funding from Silicon Valley heavy hitters, including Y Combinator Ron Conway, and Eric Hahn. Etacts was eventually acquired by Salesforce, and Liu joined the company to oversee its social CRM product. Liu would go on to found low-code collaboration startup Airtable, recently valued at over $1 billion.
Notable investments: Carta, Etsy, Away, Sprig
Depending on how you look at it, Butterfield is either one of the best tech founders of all time or one of the worst game developers. Flickr, the photo-sharing app he helped create and eventually acquired by Yahoo, was an internal tool he and his team created while developing a failed online video game. Slack, the enterprise messaging giant, was similarly developed by Butterfield and his co-founders during another ill-fated video game project. Today, he's worth an estimated $1.6 billion.
Notable investments: Uber, Zappos, Facebook, Forge Global, Flexport
Banister was an early pioneer of the digital revolution, developing some of the core technologies that still power the online advertising industry. He also served as an early advisor and board member at PayPal. He's continued to be an important power broker in Silicon Valley, backing some of the industry's most important startups.
Notable investments: Material Security, Stytch, Supabase, Tabular, Gem
Narkhede confounded Oscilar in 2021 to help fintech companies prevent fraud with AI. Oscilar is her second company; she previously started data processing platform Confluent in 2014 and served as its chief technology and product officer until 2020. She remains a board member at Confluent today. Before Confluent, she spent four years at LinkedIn, where she co-created the open-source event streaming platform, Apache Kafka.
Notable investments: Notion, Eruditus, Vanta, Cred, Sprig, Parafin
Kothari started at news aggregation app Pulse as a 23-year-old graduate student at Stanford Engineering. LinkedIn acquired Pulse in 2013 for $90 million, and Kothari spent the next five years at LinkedIn, including as the head of LinkedIn's India market.
He joined Notion in 2018 as a cofounder and chief operating officer, five years after making his first investment ever into Notion, a $75,000 check from the proceeds of Pulse's sale to LinkedIn. Today, Notion is reportedly valued at $10 billion.
Notable investments: Impossible Foods, Nurx, Solugen, Stripe, Netlify
Preston-Werner is best known for co-founding the software development platform GitHub in 2008, which Microsoft acquired for $7.5 billion in 2018. Preston-Werner resigned from GitHub in 2014 following an internal harassment probe.
A few years later, in 2018, he started the language-learning app Chatterbug with other former GitHub cofounders and executives. He invests in early-stage tech companies through Preston-Werner Ventures, with a focus on developer tools, AI, and climate tech, and has backed more than 100 companies since 2012.
Notable investments: Stripe, Gusto, Pika, Forward, Color, Instacart
Levie dropped out of college at the University of Southern California during his third year in 2005 to start the cloud-storage platform Box. The company, backed by investors including billionaire Mark Cuban and firms like Andreessen Horowitz, and valued at $1.6 billion when it went public in 2015, now has a market capitalization of $3.9 billion.
Levie has served as Box's CEO for nearly 20 years. Publicly, he's been quiet about his investments, but PitchBook suggests he's written at least 60 angel checks since 2012.
Notable investments: Deel, Nelo, Dub, Linear, SEON, The Browser Company
Choi began her career in investment banking at now-defunct Legg Mason before entering the world of corporate strategy. After stints at Yahoo and Warner Bros. Entertainment, she spent eight years as LinkedIn's head of corporate development, leading more than forty acquisitions and strategic investments by the social media company. She's held leadership roles at Coinbase for the past six years, stepping into the roles of president and COO in 2020.
Notable investments: Synthesia, Cloudinary, SecurityScorecard, Cyera, LightDash, Flox
Guy Podjarny first delved into cybersecurity as a software engineer for Sanctum, which was acquired by Watchfire. He had a stint at IBM, where he helmed the development of various IBM security products, before founding his first startup, Blaze.io, in 2010. In 2015, he launched Snyk, a cybersecurity company that helps developers write secure software.
Podjarny is keen to back B2B SaaS companies targeted at technical audiences and looks for AI startups that offer "truly transformative solutions that have long-term viability," he told BI.
Notable investments: Edgeless Systems, Supabase, Xata
The Danish native splits his time between San Francisco and the European Union while running his cloud computing startup, Netflify, which he founded in 2015. Bach previously spent 14 years in the agency world, where he launched Denmark's first hybrid production agency. With around 50 angel investments under his belt, he has backed startups with an AI, clean tech, and life sciences focus.
Notable investments: Deel, Magical, Replit
Hiremath cofounded video messaging app Loom in 2015, leading its engineering division before taking the mantle of CTO in 2022. The following year, software juggernaut Atlassian acquired Loom for $975 million, and Hiremath now spearheads Loom's engineering team at Atlassian.
Notable investments: Gusto, Linear, Railway
Tech veteran Cheever started his career at Amazon and Facebook before cofounding Quora, a question-and-answer platform, in 2009. Though he stepped down from Quora in 2012, Cheever has continued his entrepreneurial journey as cofounder and CEO of Expo, a software development startup.
Notable investments: Carta, Flexport, Bonsai
A self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur, Cook has helmed several C-suite positions at growth-stage startups. He started out as a technical product manager at Microsoft, while simultaneously taking the mantle of CTO at athletics recruiting platform BeRecruited.
An outdoor enthusiast, Cook founded AllTrails, a platform for hikers to discover trails, in 2010 and sold it to Spectrum Equity in 2018. Since then, he has led fitness platform FitOn as its president and backed healthcare investment firm HC9 as a limited partner.
Notable investments: ChartHop, Coda, Deel, Linear
Hughes Johnson was previously the COO of payments giant Stripe, which was most recently valued at $65 billion. Hughes Johnson, who left in April 2021 but still serves as a corporate officer and advisor.
Before Stripe, she spent a decade working at Google in several roles, including overseeing parts of Gmail, Google Apps, and Consumer Operations, as well Google's self-driving car project.
Notable investments: Descript, Secureframe, WorkOS,
Vohra is the founder of email startup Superhuman, which raised over $100 million in funding and was last valued at $825 million.
Prior to founding Superhuman, Vohra founded another email startup Rapportive, which was sold to LinkedIn. Vohra is a prolific angel investor and has backed more than 100 startups.
Notable investments: Deel, Relativity Space, Ginkgo Bioworks, Jeeves, Airspace Intelligence, Gecko Robotics
Beryl is the founder and a partner at early-stage VC firm Four Cities Capital. Before that, he was the cofounder and COO of battery company Solid Energy, which went public via a special-purpose acquisition company deal in 2022, founded and led the fintech lending company Earnest, and also cofounded and was CEO of the cryptocurrency trading platform Rocketplace. Beryl started his career at Morgan Stanley and was a partner at A16z and Y Combinator.
Notable investments: Clipboard Health, Newfront, Workstream
Xu is the cofounder and CEO of DoorDash, which he started with Stanford Graduate School of Business classmates Andy Fang, Evan Moore, and Stanley Tang. He became an overnight billionaire when DoorDash went public in 2020, and has used his wealth to invest in several startups. Xu is also a recurring "shark" on the ABC investing reality show "Shark Tank."
Notable investments: OpenAI, Fanatics, Klarna, Stripe, SpaceX, Epic Games
Shankar is a founding member of the employee experience startup Atomicwork, and before that, cofounded Freshworks, a company that builds cloud-based business software that went public in 2021. Shankar led the company's quality assurance portfolio and then launched its go-to-market efforts in the US and Europe and helped to build the business in those markets.
Notable Investments: Pinterest, AngelList, Slack, Instacart, GitLab, Mistral.ai
Laraki was an early product leader at Google, where he worked on performance infrastructure and client-side software. Laraki then cofounded MixerLabs, the startup behind the local information site TownMe, which Twitter bought in 2009. While at Twitter, he was the vice president of product, helping create the company's first revenue products and grow its user base from 50 to 200 million users.
After leaving Twitter, Laraki cofounded Color Health, a healthcare delivery platform that provides the resources needed to distribute large-scale health initiatives like cancer prevention, screening programs, and other healthcare services. He's been the company's CEO for the past 10 years.
Notable investments: Boom Supersonic, Cerebras, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Cresta, Groq, Gusto, Rubrik
Mark Leslie, the former chief executive of Veritas Software, grew the data management powerhouse from a dozen employees to 6,000 over his 11 years at the company. Since he left in 2021, he's poured his time and attention into investing in world-changing technologies, such as supersonic passenger airplanes, fusion power plants, and wildfire detection systems.
Notable investments: Opendoor, DraftKings, Desktop Metal, Gusto, Planet Labs, Notarize
AI-powered licensing platform Patented.ai, founded in 2023, is Chang's sixth startup. Previously, Chang cofounded ventures including automated accounting company Digits, last valued at $565 million in 2022, and error reporting tool Crashlytics, which Twitter acquired in 2012 in a deal that valued Crashlytics at over $100 million.
Chang has angel invested in more than 80 startups to date, 31 of which he says went public or were acquired and is a limited partner in more than 20 venture funds. He's also produced three films alongside Kayak cofounder Paul English, including 2017's Chasing Coral, a documentary on coral bleaching that won an Emmy award for outstanding nature documentary.
Notable investments: Postmates, Bonsai, Sleep Reset
A self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur, Cook has helmed several C-suite positions at growth-stage startups. He started out as a technical product manager at Microsoft, while simultaneously taking the mantle of CTO at athletics recruiting platform BeRecruited. An outdoor enthusiast, Cook founded AllTrails, a platform for hikers to discover trails, in 2010 — and sold it to Spectrum Equity in 2018. Since then, he has led fitness platform FitOn as its president, and backed healthcare investment firm HC9 as a limited partner.
Notable investments: Superhuman, Cover, Workstream, according to PitchBook
Ferdowsi is the cofounder of Dropbox which he launched in 2007 while still a student at MIT with fellow student Drew Houston, who's now the company's CEO. Ferdowsi was Dropbox's CTO from 2007 until 2016. He left Dropbox in 2020.
Notable investments: Carta, Clubhouse, Color Genomics, Lovevery
In addition to working on Honeycomb, her collaborative parenting app, Sladden is an active member of the angel investing community. She is a founding partner of the angel investing collective #ANGELS, which aims to get more women on the cap table of successful startups. Earlier in her career, she advised startups as well as bigger companies including newspaper publisher Gannett, and she was an early employee at Twitter.
Notable investments: Oscar, Plaid, Spring Health, Ramp, Zipline
Nat Turner is the animating spirit behind Operator Partners, a venture capital firm he founded with his Flatiron Health collaborator Zach Weinberg and two others in 2020. They invest only their own capital, which lets them move quickly and stay flexible on ownership targets.