When a venture capital firm makes an investment in a startup, it's usually the culmination of a great deal of research. But once the money is with the startup, what does the VC expect in terms of timeline and return?
App marketing agency Sensor Tower released a study this week ranking venture capital firms based on the number of times apps in their respective portfolios were downloaded from the App Store.
From January 1 through December 31 of 2015, the agency tracked the top 1,000 most downloaded iPhone and iPad apps on the U.S. App Store. They identified the apps in each VC's portfolio and combined the total number of downloads each of those apps had.
According to the study's findings, the portfolio of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers — which includes Snapchat, Spotify and Duolingo, among others — ranked first with 81.26 million downloads. In 2015, KPCB held active investments in 13 of the App Store's top 1,000 apps.
Rounding out the top three were the portfolios of Institutional Venture Partners (Snapchat, Dropbox) and Accel Partners (Slack, Spotify).
Image courtesy of Sensor Tower
Of the top 1,000 apps on the U.S. App Store, which account for just over 265 million total downloads, 85 were funded by the firms analyzed by Sensor Tower.
Among the apps downloaded, Airbnb had the most investments by VCs in the top 30, with 10. Dropbox (seven investments) came in second, and Uber and Lookout tied for third with six investments each. Of the App Store's 23 categories, 17 of them had VC-funded apps in the top 1,000 last year. Of the VC-backed apps, Games (21), Music and Social Media (8) and Photo & Video (6) led the way.
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