In 2024 the most active US angel investor was Sahin Boydas, who writes this site, with Paul Taylor second and the anonymous web3 investor DCF GOD third, according to Lenny's Newsletter and Crunchbase. Over five years, Pareto Holdings' Edward Lando and Nadav Ben-Chanoch led. No comparable public ranking of individual angels for 2025 exists in the sources used here.
Lenny Rachitsky published the only public ranking of individual angels by activity in those sources, built with Crunchbase and released on December 24, 2024. This page reports what its free text shows, what it cannot show, and what has changed for the people on it. Everything about a named investor below comes from that post or from the source linked next to the claim. Part of the post is for paid subscribers, and this page goes no further than the free text.
Who were the most active angel investors in 2024?
The post ranks the top ten for 2024 and describes most of them. These are the ranks its visible text spells out, each with one fact from it:
1. Sahin Boydas. That is me. Lenny's text names Anthropic, OpenAI, Scale, Hugging Face, Postman, Front, WHOOP, Pika and Eight Sleep among my investments. As of October 2026 I have made 234 angel investments in total.
2. Paul Taylor. Invests almost exclusively in web3.
3. DCF GOD. An anonymous investor, also exclusively web3.
5. Anatoly Yakovenko. Co-founder of Solana.
7. Nat Friedman. Former GitHub CEO, mostly AI, co-investing with Daniel Gross.
8. Roman Smolevskiy. Invests in PropTech, ConTech and RealTech.
9. Jeff Dean. Chief Scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research.
10. Guillermo Rauch. CEO and co-founder of Vercel.
The visible text gives no entry for ranks 4 and 6, so this page does not name them. It notes that Daniel Gross is also on the list and says Elad Gil and Sahin are doing especially well among non-web3 investors. It gives no per-person deal counts for 2024.
Who was the most active angel investor over five years?
The five-year list is a different group, and it is the one to read if you want consistent activity rather than one busy year:
Edward Lando and Nadav Ben-Chanoch of Pareto Holdings, with more than 1,000 startups.
Gokul Rajaram, a generalist across B2B, B2C, fintech, infrastructure and AI.
Elad Gil, who by Lenny's account now focuses mostly on AI.
Scott Belsky, who gravitates to consumer products. His own pages are summarized in the Scott Belsky profile.
Jon Oringer, the Shutterstock founder and Pareto co-founder.
Charlie Songhurst, a former Microsoft strategy executive.
Naval Ravikant, covered in his investing strategy.
Mark Cuban, with the widest spread of categories on the list.
Lachy Groom, profiled in this piece on his move from Stripe to angel investing.
Sahin Boydas, which is me again.
What do the two lists have in common, and what does this site add?
Among the visible ranked entries, only one name sits on both lists: Sahin Boydas, first for 2024 and tenth over five years. That is what the two windows would predict. A single busy year rewards whoever deployed fastest, while five years rewards whoever kept going, so the leaders of each are mostly different people.
This site can add one thing Lenny's text does not: how the highlighted companies on my own angel investments page break down. It shows 12 companies, which are not all 234 investments. Seven are AI (OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale AI, Hugging Face, Pika, Artisan AI and Brainbase), two are consumer (WHOOP and Eight Sleep), and one each is developer tools (Postman), B2B SaaS (Front) and fintech (Mercury). That is a set of highlights, not a count of every deal, so do not read it as a sector census.
How reliable is a "most active" ranking?
Less than the clean numbering suggests, and Lenny says so himself. Crunchbase builds its data from public fundraising announcements plus cap tables that firms and angels opt in to share, and his instruction is to treat the numbers as directional, not exact. A deal that is never announced or shared cannot be counted, so an investor's real activity can be higher than the ranking shows.
Activity is also not performance. The ranking counts deals, not check sizes, ownership or outcomes. The post has a section headed "Angel investors with the most exits in the past six years", but it is for paid subscribers, so this page does not summarize it.
As for 2025, the public rankings in the sources used count firms, not individuals. Crunchbase's full-year list names Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, General Catalyst and Sequoia Capital as the most active post-seed investors, each in more than 100 reported rounds. That is why this page treats 2024 as the data year.
What has changed for the people on the list since December 2024?
Some of the busiest names moved into full-time roles, which matters if you plan to pitch them:
Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross: SiliconANGLE reported in July 2025 that Gross was joining Meta Superintelligence Labs and that Friedman co-leads the unit. It also relayed a Wall Street Journal report that Meta had offered to buy out some of the limited partners in their fund NFDG, seeking up to 49% of its holdings.
Scott Belsky: TechCrunch reported in February 2025 that he was leaving his role as Adobe's chief strategy officer to join the film studio A24.
Lachy Groom: TechCrunch's January 2026 profile finds him at the robotics company Physical Intelligence, which it says has raised over $1 billion, after roughly five years as an angel investor.
A list built on 2024 deals does not tell you who is writing checks in 2026.
How should a founder use this list?
Lenny's own advice, which he borrows from a seed-fundraising guide by Terrence Rohan and Jack Altman, is to look for a warm introduction first, because good investors use introductions as a filter. A cold email is still worth sending: they note it has almost no downside. Match sector before you write. The 2024 names cluster in AI, web3 and B2B software, with Roman Smolevskiy's real-estate focus the exception, so a consumer founder should read the five-year list too, where Lenny names Belsky and Ravikant as the most frequent consumer investors.
Then do the unglamorous work of finding the path to each person. The guide to finding angel investors for your startup covers the routes, and the AI angel list narrows this one to a sector. My own account of the 2024 result is in how I became the most active angel investor. More rankings and profiles are in the angel investing section.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q:Who is the most active angel investor right now?
On the only public individual ranking in the sources used, the 2024 leader was Sahin Boydas, with Pareto Holdings' founders leading the five-year list. No comparable 2025 ranking of individuals exists in those sources, so any claim about "right now" would be a guess.
Q:Does the most active angel investor mean the best one?
No. Activity counts deals, not returns or the help an investor gives after the check. Lenny's data also undercounts unannounced deals, so even the activity count is directional.
Q:How many deals did the number one angel make in 2024?
Lenny's text does not give a count for any 2024 investor, and this page quotes none. My own total is 234 angel investments as of October 2026, which is my count rather than a Crunchbase figure.
Q:Should I cold email the people on this list?
Warm introductions work better, and Lenny's advice is to try for one first. If you cannot find one, a short, specific cold email costs little, and Lenny links a contact form for the investors who have one.
Q:What does Lenny's chart show that the text does not?
The text introduces a chart as a visual of the ranking data over time. The text itself gives no deal counts and no entries for ranks 4 and 6, so the chart in Lenny's post is the place to look for anything more. This page quotes no number from it.