The numbers are unambiguous—we’re living in the golden age of venture capital and private equity. From the numerous “unicorns” busy spending their way to scale to $100-million Series A rounds to the rise and fall of entire sectors overnight as venture money changes its fickle course, there’s no escaping it.

Venture capitalists (VCs) are happy staying in the background through all of this. They’re letting their investments—whether hits or misses—do the talking. Add to that the sheer number of investment announcements each day, it’s hard to observe patterns and understand tactics followed by venture investors. 

We decided to change our vantage point and look at the VCs. To do so, we needed reliable data on the investments made by venture investors over a longer period—2017 to 2019 (till 15 September). We partnered with data-based research companies Zinnov and Tracxn to gather data for this story.

Here are five major trends we gleaned from the data.

2019: The year VC funds doubled down on India 

It’s interesting to note that of the top 50 investors (by number of deals), 38% VCs invested in more rounds worth $10 million and above this year over 2018. This despite the fact that we’ve compared just over nine months of 2019 against all of 2018.

Infographic
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Note that the data only reflects the number of deals that a fund was part of, either as the lead or a participant.