AI equity funding has hit a record $116B so far this year, fueled by an active network of angel investors who participated in nearly 25% of all AI deals in Q2’25.
Among them, a few are set to win big, having placed early bets on Cursor, Cognition, and Sakana AI, and 200+ other AI companies.
Using CB Insights data, we analyzed which angel investors are building the most robust AI portfolios, and asked them to share their views on where AI is heading. Below is our ranking of the top 15 angel investors based on AI activity since January 2024, and key takeaways on the list.
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Key takeaways
- Elad Gil tops the ranking with 36 AI deals since January 2024, ahead of Gokul Rajaram and Jeff Dean, each with 30 deals. Gil has scored heavy-hitters in the genAI space, such as AI search engine Perplexity, coding agent Cognition, and AI data platform Scale.
- Nearly 90% of the top angels’ AI investments target the application layer. These companies build on top of foundation models to solve specific use cases, including browser agent Yutori, computer vision development tool Roboflow, and enterprise search platform Onyx AI, each backed by 3 or more top AI angel investors.
“Over the next 1-3 years, I expect the application layer to be very fruitful for AI startups. There are a tremendous number of spaces that were hitherto inaccessible for software but now are opened up thanks to AI.” — Gokul Rajaram
- 40% of companies backed by the top AI angels are founded by big tech veterans. This includes Meta’s 14-year product design leader Julie Zhou who founded the AI-powered analytics platform Sundial, and Nvidia’s 8-year engineering lead Ambuj Kumar, who launched AI security agent startup Simbian.
“AI is a relentless technology. Things are moving so fast and the models are getting better every day. Whenever you have a space that’s moving so quickly, the one constant you can bet on are the founders who are capable of navigating this change. My strategy is to simply find the founders building companies that are the right vessel to deliver the dramatic progress we’re seeing in model capabilities.” —Kulveer Taggar
- Angels are positioning early in multimodal AI’s next wave. With modalities like voice attracting $371M as of July 2025 funding and humanoid robotics projected to reach $2.3B by year-end, investors are betting on the technologies that will power the next phase of human-AI interaction. Our top angel investors have backed World Labs (world model developer), LiveKit (multimodal AI development platform), and Hamming (AI voice agent) since January 2024 as examples of this shift towards multimodal in action.
If you aren’t already a client, sign up for a free trial to learn more about our platform.“The next generation of AI leaders will be cross-functional teams with deep vertical expertise. As foundational models continue to commoditize very fast, the edge will go to founders who work backwards from user pain points and harness emerging modalities like audio, robotics, world models.” —Mehdi Ghissassi