AngelList

In April 2007, serial entrepreneur Naval Ravikant and venture capitalist Babak Nivi started the blog Venture Hacks, which explained startup fundraising, such as how to negotiate a term sheet. AngelList later came to be seen as the productization of this resource.⁠[1][1][1]

In 2010, Ravikant and Nivi began screening startups and recommending the best prospects to a mailing list of select investors called AngelList, the product’s name coming from this list of angel investors; by the end of that year, the two decided to make it a full-time company.⁠[2][2][3][2]

At the time it worked like this: the two screened both the deals pushed out to the list and the investors receiving the emails, and sent deal summaries once or twice a week; if an investor was interested, they responded, and AngelList coordinated an introduction. By October 2010, the list had nearly 400 investors, had helped 50 companies get funded, and had looked at over 1,000 deals.⁠[1][1][1][1]

In 2012, AngelList began enabling startups to raise money from angel investors through the site free of charge, and in the same year launched AngelList Talent to help startups hire. Ravikant lobbied in Washington, D.C., to have the platform’s business model excepted from broker-dealer regulations, and the change went into effect as part of the 2012 Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act.⁠[4][3][2][2]

In March 2013, AngelList received a no-action letter from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission allowing it to operate its online investment platform, AngelList Invest: AngelList Advisors would set up an individual investment vehicle for each portfolio company, open only to accredited investors, with a minimum investment of $1,000 per person.⁠[5][5][5][5][5]

In July 2013, AngelList began testing Syndicates, a co-investing feature that let accredited investors on the platform create and lead a fund of angel money for a specific startup, with the lead angel setting the carry percentage. By 2014, AngelList itself took an additional 5 percent carry on such deals.⁠[6][6][6][7]

In April 2014, Maiden Lane, a $25 million fund closely tied to but technically not part of AngelList, was unveiled; it would invest only in AngelList syndicates or hand money to active angels on the platform, and its general partners were AngelList’s chief operating officer Kevin Laws and Dustin Dolginow of Atlas Venture.⁠[7][7][7]

In the first year of Syndicates, about $87 million worth of seed deals were transacted via AngelList, with volume rising more than 300% between February and October 2014. In November 2014, AngelList launched a series of new funds for institutional investors, each designed to support syndicate investments in 100 startups, with deals selected by an algorithm with a bit of human curation on top.⁠[4][4][4]

In October 2015, the Chinese private equity firm CSC Group committed $400 million to Upshot, a new $450 million fund that would both back existing syndicates and help activate new ones, and allow AngelList to participate in these companies’ follow-on rounds. At that point AngelList had helped facilitate $205 million in investment for 650 seed-stage companies. By August 2016, the fund was managed by Veronica Wu, a former VP at Tesla Motors in Beijing, and others, and was on track to invest $25 million to $40 million that year, with an average check of about $100,000.⁠[8][8][8][8][9][9]

In December 2016, AngelList acquired the product discovery site Product Hunt; the price was not disclosed, and numerous sources familiar with the terms put it at around $20 million. Product Hunt continued to operate as a standalone site, with founder Ryan HooverRyan HooverRyan Hoover is an entrepreneur and early-stage investor who founded the new-product discovery community Product Hunt in 2013, served as its CEO until 2020, and sold the company to AngelList in 2016; since 2017 he has run the early-stage venture fund Weekend Fund.Open the full entry staying on. Ravikant later said that AngelList started out helping startups raise money and then moved into recruiting, and the missing piece was helping them find their early customers, which Product Hunt had done very well.⁠[10][10][10][10][11][11][11]

In May 2017, AngelList launched Angel Funds, in which AngelList and outside venture firms provide capital to a select group of proven “angel-operators” to invest in a basket of startups. Ravikant said at the time that 1,500 companies on the platform had already raised $500 million and had gone on to raise over $5 billion in subsequent rounds, and that its recruiting marketplace had 25,000 startups recruiting and about one million candidates.⁠[11][11][11]

In 2018, Ravikant and Jeff Fagnan founded Spearhead, which backs founders to make angel investments, with AngelList providing legal and back-office services for the Spearhead funds.⁠[12][12]

In January 2018, AngelList expanded Syndicates to India, after earlier opening it in the US, Canada, and the UK; by then, Syndicates had raised $705 million for more than 1,870 startups, which had gone on to raise $6.4 billion in follow-on funding, including Uber.⁠[13][13][13][13]

In mid-2019, Avlok Kohli became CEO of AngelList. He said the recruiting business, AngelList Talent, had already been spun off first as a separate corporate entity with its own CEO and team; his goal on taking over was to spin out the venture business and rethink it as a business of its own, and a couple of years later Product Hunt was spun off in the same way.⁠[14][14][14][14][14]

In 2020, AngelList launched rolling funds, in which fund managers raise new capital commitments from investors on a quarterly basis and invest as they go, with investors committing for a minimum of one year. By September 2020, about 70 rolling funds had been created on AngelList; Kohli said rolling funds are what venture fund structures “would look like if they were built in the age of software.”⁠[15][15][15][15][15]

In December 2021, AngelList raised $25 million for the AngelList Early Stage Quant Fund, which planned $250,000 checks into over 100 companies, selected on quantitative signals such as how quickly a startup’s job applications grow; the largest limited partner was an early-stage investment firm founded by WorldQuant founder Igor Tulchinsky, and Ravikant was also among the investors.⁠[16][16][16][16]

In March 2022, AngelList Venture raised a $100 million Series B at a $4 billion valuation, led by Tiger and Accomplice, its first financing in seven years. In 2021 the platform supported 11,300 startup investments, up from 3,800 the year before, and its assets grew to $10 billion, up from $3 billion the year before.⁠[17][17][17][17]

In April 2022, AngelList Venture opened a follow-on round to its most active general partners and limited partners and raised an additional $44 million; Kohli said almost 10% of its active customers took part. In 2021, some 7,000 startups raised more than $3.6 billion through the platform.⁠[18][18][18]

On November 15, 2022, the recruiting business AngelList Talent became a separate company renamed Wellfound, and AngelList Venture was renamed simply AngelList. By then AngelList Venture had facilitated funding for over 12,000 startups and had more than $14 billion in assets supported for fund managers.⁠[3][3]

In mid-June 2023, AngelList acquired Nova, a Y Combinator-backed fintech company that built investor management software for institutional private funds; it was only the company’s second acquisition since inception and marked its expansion into private equity.⁠[19][19][19]

As of October 2026, AngelList describes itself as “the financial system for private markets,” with a portfolio of businesses that includes Funds, which provides administration for venture capital funds; USVC, a venture investing product for retail investors; Meridian, a wealth service for private markets; and Nova, a forthcoming banking and payments service. USVC is a registered closed-end fund managed by AngelList Asset Management LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. Wellfound is no longer part of AngelList.⁠[20][20][20][20]

AngelList: Official website: https://www.angellist.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[21]

X: Public account: https://x.com/angellist (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/angellist (opens in a new window)⁠[21]