{"id":40181,"date":"2026-05-07T16:51:40","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T20:51:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/?p=40181"},"modified":"2026-05-08T03:09:25","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T07:09:25","slug":"mapping-venture-capital-ecosystems-how-investor-tribes-shape-the-unicorn-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/visualization\/mapping-venture-capital-ecosystems-how-investor-tribes-shape-the-unicorn-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"Mapping Venture Capital Ecosystems: How Investor Tribes Shape the Unicorn Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
What\u2019s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about venture capitalists? For me, it\u2019s always been the mental image of a sharp businessman or businesswoman in a suit, looking for the next breakthrough company to invest in. Clearly this image is influenced by movies and TV shows. But as I dug deeper into the unicorn startup ecosystem, I realized that the real venture capital firms aren\u2019t really lone wolves. They are, in fact, an intricate network of companies that collaborate together to back up startups and collectively push them to become unicorns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I started investigating the companies that invest in unicorn startups, I found a very distinct pattern of \u2018investor tribes\u2019 or communities. These tribes are basically a group of investor companies that repeatedly collaborate together and invest in the same startups. I began to wonder if this collaboration was one of the reason why the startups backed by these tribes became successful and gained a billion dollar valuation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I started with the unicorn companies dataset containing detailed records of over 1000 billion dollar startups launched between 2007-2022, including their investors, valuations, industries, and locations. To make this network visualization, I narrowed down my focus to the top 500 companies by valuation. Including everything would have created an unreadable hairball of overlapping connections. The original dataset I had was not compatible with Gephi so I had to clean them up a bit. I used Claude as my AI assistant to run python scripts that transformed the messy investor data in my original file into two excel files, one for nodes and one for edges.\u00a0Ultimately, this is what I came up with:<\/p>\n\n\n\nVenture Capital Ecosystems across top 500 unicorn startups (2007-2023)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
The network’s structure is quite straightforward: Each node represents one unicorn startup. The lines (edges) connect two startups if they share at least two investors. My choice of showing connection between startups ONLY if they shared two or more investors and ignoring the connection between startups that shared a single common investor, was intentional. Two startups sharing a single VC firm could be coincidental. However, when two startups are backed by two or more VC firms, you know that the network is built from a collaboration standpoint. This way, each line in my visualization represents real patterns of investors working together rather than accidental one-time overlap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I used Gephi to map these connections. I used ForceAtlas2 to cluster together related nodes and push away the unrelated nodes. This algorithm immediately spread out my visualization to make the connections appear better. I ran a modularity analysis to detect communities within networks. The algorithm detected eight distinct communities and organised the nodes into structured clusters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finally, I sized the nodes according to startup valuation. The industry giants like ByteDance ($140 billion), SpaceX ($100 billion), and Stripe ($95 billion) dominate as the largest nodes. I colored the nodes according to their modularities to make all the VC tribes stand out even more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What the network reveals<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What stands out in this visualization is the largest cluster that separates out from the rest of the network. This is the Chinese Tech Ecosystem<\/strong>, colored purple<\/strong>. This community includes unicorns like ByteDance, Epic Games, Canva, Yuanfudao, and J&T Express. They are backed primarily by prominent VC firms like Sequoia Capital China, Tencent Holdings, and Hillhouse Capital. Its isolation from the rest of the western ecosystems indicates how the Chinese venture capitals operate almost as a separate entity with minimal crossover and collaboration with US or European investors.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
The orange<\/strong> cluster is what I like to call the Silicon Valley Investors <\/strong>ecosystem because it features most of the famous unicorns like SpaceX, Stripe, and Instacart. This is the most successful cluster backed by silicom valley VCs like Sequoia Capital (US), Tiger Global Management, and Khosla Ventures.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
The Fintech and SaaS companies seem to be divided between two VC groups. The light blue <\/strong>cluster is the US Fintech & SaaS Ecosystem<\/strong> including companies like Miro, Scale AI, Vercel, Webflow. They are backed by VCs like Rabbit Capital, Index, Insight Partners. The lime green<\/strong> cluster includes Fintech and SaaS companies from countries like UK, US, Canada, Germany such as Checkout.com, Revolut, Razorpay, CRED and Brex. I labelled this as the Global Fintech<\/strong> cluster. They are backed by VCs like Index, DST, Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital. This division within the same domain of Fintech and SaaS shows that some investor groups stick to their home market while others actively seek opportunities across borders.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The red<\/strong> cluster represents the SF SaaS Ecosystem<\/strong>, featuring SF-based productivity powerhouses like Notion Labs, Figma, Airtable, Plaid and Gusto backed by VCs like Index Ventures, CRV, GV, Formation 8. <\/p>\n\n\n
The cyan cluster represents the SoftBank-General Atlantic Portfolio<\/strong>, characterized by late-stage global expansion investments such as FirstCry, Kavak, Nuro, and Gympass backed by the SoftBank Group and General Atlantic. This cluster stands out because of these investors focus heavily on emerging markets (India, Mexico, Brazil) and invest in high-growth companies across borders.<\/p>\n\n\n
\nSoftBank-General Atlantic Portfolio (SoftBank Group, General Atlantic)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
The dark blue cluster represents the Emerging Tech Network<\/strong> backed primarily by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and General Catalyst. This cluster includes cutting-edge companies like Databricks, OpenSea, Tanium, and Clubhouse belonging to diverse sectors (crypto, AI, infrastructure, healthcare, etc). This shows that unlike more focused clusters, a16z casts a wider net across multiple emerging technology categories.<\/p>\n\n\n
Looking at this network, a few patterns jumped out:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Co-investment is the norm for VC Firms. Almost every major unicorn has multiple investors from the same ecosystem backing them. Venture capital success isn’t about solo wins. It’s about being part of the right syndicate. This completely changed my assumption that VCs were competing against each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some investors like Index Ventures, Tiger Global appears across multiple major clusters, showing that many VCs believe in diversifying their portfolio and investing across multiple sectors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reflections<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
This dataset did come with some limitations. I realised between the Chinese tech ecosystem (purple) and Mega-Unicorn\u2019 Ecosystem (orange), it appears as if Bytedance has more valuation that SpaceX. That\u2019s because this dataset is till 2023, SpaceX\u2019s valuation has grown much higher than Bytedance in the last 3 years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This project completely changed how I understand venture capital. What started as curiosity about who funds unicorns turned into discovering an entire hidden structure of collaboration. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What\u2019s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about venture capitalists? For me, it\u2019s always been the mental image of a sharp businessman or businesswoman in a suit, looking for the next breakthrough company to invest in. Clearly this image is influenced by movies and TV shows. But as I dug deeper…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4517,"featured_media":40182,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1930],"class_list":["post-40181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-visualization"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2026\/05\/Frame-1-scaled.png?fit=1991%2C2560&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paBdcV-as5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4517"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40181"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40231,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40181\/revisions\/40231"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40181"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=40181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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