No public source ranks AI angels by results, so this list is in no particular order. It draws on the December 2024 Lenny's Newsletter and Crunchbase activity data, where Jeff Dean, Nat Friedman with Daniel Gross, Elad Gil, Guillermo Rauch and Naval Ravikant appear, and on each investor's own pages and listed check sizes.
Treat this as a map of who is visibly active in AI, not a recommendation to pitch or to follow anyone's checks. The sources are dated, several investors have changed roles since, and a name appearing here says nothing about returns. Everything attributed to a named person below comes from the source linked next to it.
Which angel investors are most active in AI?
Ordered by surname.
Jeff Dean. Lenny's post identifies him as Chief Scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research and lists him among the ten most active angels of 2024. The post gives no portfolio for him, so this page says nothing more about his investments.
Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Lenny's describes Friedman as the former GitHub CEO who now mostly co-invests with Gross, primarily in AI, in more than 100 startups including ElevenLabs, Character.ai, Retool, Scale, Vercel, Perplexity, AssemblyAI, Magic.dev, Apollo and Sentry. AI Grant, an accelerator the pair fund, offers $250,000 on an uncapped SAFE to AI product startups, and its FAQ says they separately invest in startups, generally leading rounds, with checks of $1 million to $100 million. SiliconANGLE reported in July 2025 that Gross was joining Meta Superintelligence Labs and that Friedman co-leads that unit, so check what they are doing now before you plan a pitch.
Elad Gil. His own site says he runs the multi-stage firm Gil&Co and invested early in, or led rounds for, companies including Abridge, Anthropic, Cerebras, Cognition, Decagon, Harvey, Mistral, OpenAI and Perplexity. Lenny's says he is mostly focused on AI startups these days.
Gokul Rajaram. A generalist rather than an AI specialist: Lenny's puts him second over five years and says his investments span B2B, B2C, fintech, infrastructure and AI, with Vercel and Postman among them. He is a former senior operator at Google, Facebook, Square and DoorDash.
Guillermo Rauch. The CEO and co-founder of Vercel, tenth in Lenny's 2024 ranking, with Perplexity, ElevenLabs, Scale, Honeycomb, Magic and Runway among his investments.
Naval Ravikant. Lenny's lists Perplexity and Replit among his early investments, alongside Uber, Twitter, Substack, Opendoor, Vercel, Eight Sleep and Notion, and calls his portfolio fairly generalist. His approach is covered in this profile of his angel investing strategy.
Lenny's own advice to a founder starting an AI company is that Friedman, Gil and Dean belong on the cap-table wish list.
What check sizes do AI angels write?
The public numbers point to three different bands, and mixing them up wastes pitches:
Five figures. NFX Signal lists Guillermo Rauch with a range of $5,000 to $50,000 and a sweet spot of $25,000.
Low to mid six figures. Signal lists Elad Gil at $10,000 to $500,000 with a sweet spot of $100,000, and Gokul Rajaram at $25,000 to $1 million with a sweet spot of $50,000.
Seven figures and up. Friedman and Gross state $1 million to $100 million for the rounds they lead.
These are Signal's listings as of October 2026, not statements by the investors, and an investor who runs a firm may write different checks than the ones Signal shows. Ask what a person actually invests before you plan a round around them.
Why are so many angels crowding into AI?
Because that is where the money went. Crunchbase's 2025 charts show AI capturing close to 50% of all global startup funding in 2025, up from 34% in 2024. For a founder that cuts both ways: more investors want AI exposure, and more founders are asking for the same attention. The guide to angel investing in AI startups and the pieces on frontier AI companies and AI agents cover the investor side of that crowding.
How do you get an AI angel to look at your company?
Start with fit, then the introduction. Read the portfolios above and look for overlap with your product. The same names recur: Perplexity appears among the investments listed for Friedman, Gil, Rauch and Ravikant, and ElevenLabs, Scale and Magic appear for both Friedman and Rauch, which tells you these investors see many of the same deals. Lenny's guidance, borrowed from a seed-fundraising guide by Terrence Rohan and Jack Altman, is that warm introductions beat cold emails, though a cold email is still worth sending. For the mechanics, see how to find angel investors for your startup, and for the broader activity data, the most active angel investors of 2024.
A disclosure about my own AI investments
Lenny's Newsletter ranked me the most active angel investor in 2024. I am an angel investor, not a fund, and I have made 234 angel investments as of October 2026. They include OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale AI, Hugging Face, Pika, Artisan AI and Brainbase, which you can see on my angel investments page. I am not listing myself among the investors above because the ranking is Lenny's, not mine. For more sector lists and profiles, see the angel investing section.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q:Who are the top angel investors in AI?
No public source ranks them by performance. The best sourced starting list is the AI-focused names in Lenny's and Crunchbase's 2024 data: Jeff Dean, Nat Friedman with Daniel Gross, Elad Gil and Guillermo Rauch, plus generalists like Naval Ravikant and Gokul Rajaram.
Q:How much do AI angel investors usually invest?
It varies by person. NFX Signal lists sweet spots from $25,000 for Guillermo Rauch to $100,000 for Elad Gil, while Friedman and Gross say they invest $1 million to $100 million in rounds they lead. Treat the Signal figures as approximate.
Q:Are Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross still investing?
SiliconANGLE reported in July 2025 that Gross joined Meta Superintelligence Labs, that Friedman co-leads it, and that Meta offered to buy out some limited partners in their fund NFDG. AI Grant's page showed applications for its fourth batch closed in October 2026, so confirm their current activity before you pitch.
Q:Do these investors take cold pitches?
Lenny's links a contact form for investors who publish one and advises trying for a warm introduction first. A short, specific cold email is still reasonable when you cannot find an introduction.
Q:Is this list investment advice?
No. It reports who is active and what their public pages and data sources say. It does not tell you to invest in any company or to copy any investor, and activity does not show returns.