Parkway Venture Capital Ranks No. 1 Among U.S. Emerging Venture Firms in New Stanford Ranking
The AI deep-tech firm finished first among firms that raised their first fund in 2016 or later, and ranked in the top
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NEW YORK, Oct. 13, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Parkway Venture Capital, a venture firm backing fundamentally disruptive technologies, today announced it ranked first on the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson ranking of the top 100 emerging U.S. venture capital firms, the only ranking of its kind built entirely from investment data rather than reputation or self-reported returns.
Created by Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Ilya Strebulaev and researcher Blake Jackson, the ranking draws on more than 230,000 investments made by nearly 13,000 venture capitalists, with data from 2016 through June 30, 2026. Instead of counting unicorns or relying on editorial judgment, the methodology scores firms on the value they actually created. It discounts private valuations, tracks ownership through dilution, measures net profit against capital deployed and gives extra credit to investors who led rounds and took board seats.
Parkway scored 3,221 points, ahead of Factorial Funds at 2,958 and Future Ventures at 2,875. Paradigm, Craft Ventures and Bedrock complete the top six.
In the companion ranking of the 100 leading U.S. venture firms, Parkway ranked in the top 20. Against that field, Parkway’s standing is unusual. Eight of the top 20 firms were founded before 2000, and many of Parkway’s peers on the list have been investing for more than 30 years. Parkway is one of only a handful of firms founded after 2015 to break into the upper ranks.
“Every firm says it has conviction. This is the first ranking that puts a number on it,” said Gregg Hill, co-founder and managing partner of Parkway. “It counted who wrote the first check, who took the board seat and who stayed through the hard rounds. We came out first among everyone who started when we did.”
The ranking landed in the same week one of Parkway’s positions went public. Pasqal, the French neutral-atom quantum computing company Parkway backed ahead of the listing, completed its business combination with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II on August 27 and began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker PSQL on August 28. Shares climbed as much as 73% on the first day. The transaction valued Pasqal at roughly $2 billion and put approximately $360 million of cash on its balance sheet, and the company plans a subsequent listing on Euronext. Pasqal has seven quantum processors deployed at national supercomputing centers in France, Germany, Italy and Canada, three more in production, and customers including Saudi Aramco, Crédit Agricole CIB and LG Electronics. Its co-founder, Alain Aspect, won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.
That pattern shows up across the portfolio. Parkway led the $70 million Series A in Figure AI in 2023 and led the multi-billion dollar Series C in 2025, and remains among the humanoid-robotics company’s largest shareholders. It was the first venture backer of SandboxAQ after the quantum and AI company spun out of Google in 2022. It backed xAI’s $6 billion Series B in 2024 and led a $2 billion Series A in AI lab Hark this year.
While many firms spread capital across dozens or hundreds of companies, Parkway concentrates on a small group of founders, leads rounds, partners closely and stays sector-agnostic on the belief that any industry can be disrupted.
“We backed Figure AI, SandboxAQ and Pasqal before any of them were consensus, and then we held,” said Jesse Coors-Blankenship, co-founder and managing partner of Parkway. “Pasqal opening on Nasdaq is what that looks like when it works. We run a concentrated book because you cannot be that involved in 200 companies and we believe our active and positive support of our companies helps to drive success.”
With Figure AI and SandboxAQ scaling, Pasqal now public and portfolio companies including TAE Technologies, OXOS Medical and Hark on growth trajectories, the firm anticipates defending the top spot in the years ahead.
For more information, visit parkway.vc.
Parkway Venture Capital
Parkway Venture Capital is a leading venture capital firm with offices in New York and Winter Park, Fla. Founded in 2019 by managing partners Gregg Hill and Jesse Coors-Blankenship, Parkway is focused on supporting AI industry and deep tech ventures. Parkway’s 2026 investment exits include xAI, Pascal and TAE Technologies. Parkway has led recent rounds in Figure AI, Hark Labs, Oxos Medical and SandboxAQ.
Media Contact
Erica Torres
Uproar by Moburst for Parkway Venture Capital
erica.torres@moburst.com
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