Spotlighting Venture's Rising Stars: The 2025 Forbes Midas Brink List
Every year, the Forbes Midas List highlights the venture capitalists whose savvy investments have shaped the tech landscape. But before they became household names, they were focused on spotting breakout founders and forging deals with promising companies. The 2025 Midas Brink List shines a spotlight on the rising stars we expect to see on the Midas List in a few years: the next generation of venture capitalists whose early wins and sharp instincts are setting them on a trajectory toward the industry's highest honors. In fact, since we launched the Brink List, more than 30% of the investors who have appeared on it have graduated to the Midas List, Midas List Europe or Midas Seed List.
Each year we call upon a panel of investors previously named to the Brink List to use their experience and networks to help make the final determinations. Nina Achadjian of Index Ventures, Logan Bartlett of Redpoint Ventures and Sonya Huang of Sequoia served as our panelists this year and provided insights and knowledge that resulted in an exciting list of VCs.
As always, we are excited to present the list of up-and-coming VCs who are building tomorrow's tech giants.
The 2025 Forbes Midas Brink List
Leigh Marie Braswell
Leigh Marie Braswell
Partner, Kleiner Perkins
Key Deals: Neon, Nooks, Persona, Windsurf
Leigh Marie Braswell is emblematic of a new breed of venture investors – one who bridges deep technical expertise with investment acuity. After receiving degrees in math and computer science at MIT, she was an early engineer at Scale AI, where she became the company's first product manager. There, she built and later led product development for computer vision annotation products.
She began her investing career at Founders Fund and subsequently joined Kleiner Perkins in 2024. At Kleiner, she focuses on partnering with the next generation of infrastructure and machine learning application founders.
Her first investment at Kleiner was in Windsurf, a deep learning acceleration platform designed to simplify and accelerate complex artificial intelligence workloads. She met the founders, Varun and Douglas, because they were all ex-competitive mathletes at MIT. The founders had previously started Exafunction, a GPU virtualization startup – and she partnered with them as Windsurf evolved. The company is now rumored to be a $3 billion acquisition target.
Other key deals include Nooks, which automated pipeline generation by using large language models and audio AI; Neon, a next-gen cloud database company; and Persona, which focuses on identity verification.
The 2025 Forbes Midas Brink List
Konstantine Buhler
Konstantine Buhler
Partner, Sequoia Capital
Key Deals: Citadel Securities, Kumo, Roblox, Verkada, XBOW
Konstantine Buhler has quickly become a thought leader on the evolution of artificial intelligence. With three degrees from Stanford, including a Masters in Computer Science specializing in AI, he brings deep technical knowledge and a passion about the practical applications of machine learning to work with his founders.
He built a diverse resume before diving into venture: CTO at Italia Innovation Company, product manager at RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce and now SalesforceIQ), and time at McKinsey. He joined Sequoia Capital in 2019 after roles at Pritzker Group and on the investment team at Meritech Capital Partners.
He has led many of Sequoia's early-stage AI investments, including XBOW, Rox, Dust, Enter, and Xaira, a new generation of companies tackling cybersecurity, productivity, and infrastructure callenges. He sourced and co-led Sequoia's $1 billion investment into Citadel Securities in 2021.
Beyond his role at Sequoia, he is a personal seed investor in companies including OpenSea and Viz.ai. He co-created the Forbes AI 50 list in 2018 and plays a leading role in AI Ascent, Sequoia's annual gathering of AI leaders aimed at advancing the industry.
The 2025 Forbes Midas Brink List
Ambar Bhattacharyya
Ambar Bhattacharyya
Managing Partner, Maverick VenturesKey Deals: Hims & Hers, MosaicML, Collective Medical Technology, Cityblock Health, Nourish
Ambar's journey is a testament to the power of domain expertise paired with bold investing. Before joining Maverick Ventures, he was an operator at MinuteClinic, the trailblazing healthcare startup ultimately acquired by CVS Health.
After spending time at Bain Capital Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners, he went on to lead Maverick's first or second checks into many category-defining healthcare innovators, often at the seed or Series A stage.
At Hims & Hers, Bhattacharyya served on the board from Series A through IPO, with the company reaching a peak market cap of about $15 billion. He led the spin-out of Cityblock Health from Alphabet and led Maverick's Series A investment in MosaicML seven months before it was acquired by Databricks for $1.2 billion in June 2023. Almost all his notable wins were initiated at the seed or Series A stages, and he served in board roles in nearly all of those investments.
Other key investments include gene editing companies Caribou Biosciences and Homology Medicines as well as healthcare tech companies Collective Medical Technologies and Devoted Health. His colleagues note that his combination of deep healthcare domain expertise, disciplined strategy and keen foresight sets him apart.
The 2025 Forbes Midas Brink List
Miles Clements
Miles Clements
Partner, Accel
Key Deals: Cursor, Laravel, Linear, Remote
Miles Clements joined Accel in 2009 as the firm's first associate and has since become a driving force behind Accel's growth strategy, helping to lead that fund. His portfolio proves that he is willing to hunt for and back the best founders regardless of geography, with companies in Bucharest, Little Rock, San Francisco and beyond.
He invests across AI, cloud and enterprise software, and has led the firm's investments in several breakout companies including Linear, Cursor, and Laravel, where Accel's $57 million Series A investment is fueling the company's expansion into fully-managed cloud infrastructure products while maintaining a strong open-source ethos.
Earlier in his career at Accel, he worked on landmark investments in Atlassian, UiPath, and Lynda.com, which was acquired by LinkedIn. Beyond investing, Clements oversees Accel's Ignite program, bringing together CROs and revenue leaders from across the tech ecosystem.
The 2025 Forbes Midas Brink List
Sofia Dolfe
Sofia Dolfe
Partner, Index Ventures
Key deals: Atlar, Cradle, Dream Games, Printify
Sofia Dolfe is a Partner at Index Ventures. She invests in a wide range of sectors, from gaming and financial services to healthcare, and is particularly interested in how AI accelerates innovation across these sectors.
She began her investing career at Index Ventures in London, where she sourced and led investments in high-growth companies Cradle and Atlar. She was instrumental in closing the firm's investment in Dream Games and worked closely with the company's founder to the recent investment from PE firm CVC that valued the company at around $5 billion. At Printify, she represented Index on the board and facilitated the company's merger with Printful.
Prior to joining Index in 2018, she was an investor at EQT Ventures in Stockholm and a consultant with EY-Parthenon in London and Paris. She currently works in Index's San Francisco office, bringing her global perspective to the team.
The 2025 Forbes Midas Brink List
Jacob Effron
Jacob Effron
Managing Director, Redpoint Ventures
Key Deals: Abridge, Legora, Garner, Scribe, AcuityMD
Jacob Effron is a Partner at Redpoint Ventures, where his portfolio includes AI, enterprise software and healthcare, including several category-defining companies. He's known for building trusted relationships with founders and for being a deep thinker - something Abridge CEO Shiv Rao credits as an unfair advantage to the company.
At Abridge, he co-led the $150 million Series C in February 2024 alongside Lightspeed at a $850 million post-money valuation. Just a year later the company raised a round valuing it at $2.75 billion. In addition to Abridge, he's led or co-led investments in Scribe, AcuityMD, Legora and Poolside. He works closely on Scribe, an AI-based platform that helps document and scale work processes that saw a $245 million post-money value after its February 2024 Series B financing.
He hosts two of Redpoint's podcasts: Unsupervised Learning, where he's interviewed top leaders like Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Thomas Dohmke of GitHub, and Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity; and Vital Signs, a healthcare-focused show featuring experts like Mandy Cohen of the CDC and Sarah London of Centene.
The 2025 Forbes Midas Brink List
Ramtin Naimi
Ramtin Naimi
Managing Partner, Abstract
Key deals: Krea, Verse Medical, WorkOS
Ramtin Naimi's story begins with an early entrepreneurial spark. At just 13, he began trading tech stocks, ultimately choosing to forgo college in order to pursue entrepreneurship and investing full-time. After launching a hedge fund, he transitioned into private market investing, making early bets on companies like Rippling and Solana.
In 2016, at age 25, he founded Abstract to further focus on seed and early-stage investing. Since then, he has led the seed rounds for a number of exciting companies. Krea is a creative collaboration and content generation platform that subsequently closed a $47 million Series B in April 2025. He also backed healthcare tech company Verse Medical, which provides software for in-home healthcare. That company most recently raised a $42 million Series B round in April 2024.
Other early high-conviction bets include Neon, Hebbia, Polymarket, Replit, Partiful, and Clay.
The 2025 Forbes Midas Brink List
Sarah Wang
Sarah Wang
General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
Key deals: Character.ai, Cursor, Hex, Wiz, World Labs
In her role on the growth investing team at Andreessen Horowitz, Sarah Wang focuses on AI and enterprise technology investments. Her academic path is as impressive as her professional one: a John Harvard Scholar and graduate in economics from Harvard and an MBA from Stanford. Her early career included stints at Morgan Stanley and the Boston Consulting Group, before she dove into venture capital at DCM Ventures and Radicle Impact. She then joined TA Associates to invest in founders at growth-stage companies.
Since joining a16z, she has worked with some of the most exciting names in the industry, including collaborative data analytics company Hex, where she is a board member and led the Series B. She led the initial round of funding at Character.ai and played a key role in helping the team navigate a pivotal deal with Google that has positioned the company as a leader in conversational AI.
She led the Series B at Cursor, co-led the Series B at World Labs and led the Series B for data analytics workspace Hex. She also co-led Wiz's $1 billion Series E financing in May 2024, resulting in a post-money value of $12 billion – a bet that paid when Google announced its intent to acquire the company for $32 billion acquisition in March 2025.
The 2025 Forbes Midas Brink List
Liz Wessel
Liz Wessel
Partner, First Round Capital
Key deals: David AI, Gumloop, M7, Reducto
Liz Wessel loves working with companies that are reimagining old-school industries or that exist as a result of new or breakthrough technologies.
As the cofounder and CEO of WayUp, she spent several years building a platform for early-career talent, ultimately leading the company through a successful acquisition in 2021. She took that founder experience to Y Combinator as a Visiting Group Partner, where she coached more than 100 early-stage companies.
Since joining First Round in late 2023, she's led seed rounds in a string of high-potential companies that are already seeing sales traction and valuation increases. She was the lead seed investor in nurse-matching platform M7 in July 2024 and led the seed round in Reducto in March 2024. That company went on to secure a $25 million Series A from Benchmark earlier this year, with founders crediting her hands-on support and strategic insight as pivotal.
She is also an active angel investor, having backed another 40+ startups at their earliest stages, including Ramp, ScaleAI, Ro, Artera and others.
The 2025 Forbes Midas Brink List
Suzanne Xie
Suzanne Xie
Partner, Neo
Key deals: Aethero, Bluesky, dub, Nucleus Genomics, Tutor Intelligence
Suzanne Xie's journey from serial entrepreneur to early-stage investor is resulting in the rise of some of tech's most ambitious startups. Before joining Neo as its first investment partner in 2023, she built and scaled multiple companies. She founded Weardrobe (acquired by Like.com), kids app Hullabalu and Lightwell, an early no-code platform for mobile apps that was acquired by Twitter in 2019. At Twitter she became director of product and later led Stripe's B2B and finance software businesses, launching Stripe Invoicing.
As a founder, she participated in Y Combinator, Techstars and Facebook's first accelerator program, giving her perspective on the venture experience from a founder's point of view.
As an investor, she works to back visionary founders early. She led the first institutional seed round for decentralized social platform Bluesky, which was spun out of Twitter, and led the pre-seed financing for Aethero while working closely with the company as it participated in Neo's accelerator. And she started working with Nucleus Genomics, whose genetic testing and analysis platform enables understanding of genetic predispositions, before its $14 million Series A round was closed in January 2025.
The Midas Brink List isn't just about who's winning today – it's about who's building tomorrow. With these investors at the table, the odds look very good indeed.
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