Credo Leads, but Acquisitions Tell Half the Story

Credo Ventures leads clearly: 11 of its 26 qualifying seed bets, 42.3%, either reached Series A or exited at seed since 2020, nearly three times the population rate. Kaya VC (36.4%, 4 of 11) and Rockaway Ventures (31.3%, 5 of 16) follow, though both run on smaller cohorts than Credo's, which matters: a fund with 11 bets needs one extra hit or miss to swing its rate by roughly 9 points, while Credo's 26-company base is more resistant to that kind of noise.

The acquisition half of the measure changes the ranking more than expected. Miton shows 3 Series A graduations but 5 seed-stage acquisitions, for a combined 22.9% that a Series-A-only view would understate by nearly half. Lighthouse Ventures is the starkest case: just 1 Series A graduation against 5 seed-stage exits, landing at 17.6% total, a fund whose portfolio companies are getting bought more often than they are raising a priced round. Whether that reflects a thesis built around smaller, acquirable companies or simply a market where follow-on capital is harder to raise, the data cannot say on its own, but the pattern is real and consistent across multiple funds, not a single outlier.

Several long-running, well-known funds sit lower than their reputations might suggest: Depo Ventures at 14.8% despite the largest cohort of any fund measured (27 companies), N1 at 8.8%, and Czech Founders VC at 8.3%. None of this means those funds pick badly; a large, patient, spray-wide seed program will naturally show a lower hit rate than a smaller, more selective one, the same trade-off that shows up in venture math everywhere. It does mean that portfolio size and headline deal count are not proxies for graduation rate, and should not be read as one.

The chart above includes every fund with at least 5 qualifying seed bets, 18 in total, ranked by rate. Funds with fewer than 5 bets are left out of the chart entirely (Springtide Ventures at 100% on a single bet is not a track record), though nothing here hides how any individual fund performed.

How this was measured. A startup enters a fund's cohort if that fund's first-ever check into the company was a pre-seed or seed round, at any date, no matter how long ago. A cohort member counts as a success if the startup later raised a Series A, B, or C+ round dated 2020-01-01 or after, or if it was acquired on or after 2020-01-01 while it had never reached Series A (a seed-stage exit; an acquisition after Series A only counts as the Series A success, never twice). Country membership follows the same rule the rest of Brouky's country reports use: a startup's recorded HQ country, or any of its related countries. Acquisition dates come from a new table built specifically for this analysis, extracted from free-text status notes already in Brouky's database; of the acquisitions used here, most carry a confirmed month-level date rather than a rough year estimate. All of it was computed directly against the production database on September 18, 2026.