The Power Law is fully on display in the latest venture return numbers from UTIMCO, the money manager for the Texas state university system.1
Some of Thrive Capital’s 2022 and 2024 funds are already showing IRR of 50% or more — extraordinary paper gains for such young funds, built largely on a few concentrated bets, including OpenAI.
Notable Capital (formerly GGV Capital) also saw remarkable paper gains of nearly 100% on two 2023 funds — likely driven mostly by Anthropic.
Altimeter managing director Meghan Reynolds wrote on X Saturday that based on her internal math, VC investors’ gross profit on 3 LLM companies currently equates to ~70% of all VC profits from the previous decade. We certainly see this reflected in the top performing funds of the last four years in UTIMCO’s portfolio.
One caveat to this data: this disclosure is through November 2025. Some of the companies driving these funds’ returns have been marked up even more since this data was compiled.
While venture capital has traditionally been the get rich slow business, quick up rounds of high-flying AI startups have some recent vintages seeing remarkable markups early in the life of their funds.
The IRRs of older fund vintages are more likely to be reflective of how those funds ultimately shake out for LPs. But something amazing is afoot for more recent funds that have investments into Anthropic and OpenAI at the right time.
Our key takeaways from UTIMCO’s return data:
-
Thrive Capital’s Fund VIII — its 2022 venture vintage — had an IRR of just over 126%, according to UTIMCO’s disclosures through the end of November 2025. It’s the largest single-year IRR from a venture fund we’ve seen since we started covering these disclosures, driven by early investments in OpenAI, Cursor, Ramp, and Base Power. Thrive’s growth fund from 2022 also contains investments in OpenAI. Thrive’s 2024 venture fund is still showing slightly negative IRR. We recently reported on Thrive’s internal calculations of TVPI and DPI in its pitch deck to investors.
-
Notable Capital, which is still recorded internally at UTIMCO as GGV Capital (its former title before spinning out its China funds), boasted the largest IRR swing of any UTIMCO funds we’ve seen: its core 2023 fund IRR rose from -48% to 96% in just one year of reporting. This fund includes stakes in Anthropic and Fal. However, Notable’s older 2016 and 2018 funds lag behind some UTIMCO vintages we’ve pulled.
-
Sequoia Capital’s 2020 and 2021 funds have seen solid IRR growth in the last year. Its evergreen Sequoia Capital fund, which launched in 2021, has a positive IRR of 14.78%. Our past coverage of UTIMCO’s funds had many observers chattering about Sequoia’s performance, but this fresh data shows that five to six years in, these funds could be turning the corner. Sequoia’s 2021 Seed fund, for example, saw its IRR rise from just over 6% in last year’s report to 11.3% this year.
-
HongShan and Peak XV, on the other hand, have struggled after splitting out from Sequoia. At HongShan, 2020, 2021, and 2022 IRRs are all negative or barely positive by 2025, reflecting the troubles of the Chinese startup sector. Peak XV, whose internal dramas we revealed here, has seen its 2020 funds reach positive territory, but subsequent vintages remain underwater.
We’ve broken down vintages for nearly a decade of data from 2016 to 2024 and split them out by year to see how UTIMCO is marking up (or down) some of its venture capital investments as of November 30, 2025.2
One important thing to keep in mind: IRR figures for recent funds mostly reflect valuation mark-ups on private companies, rather than realized gains, so any broad market downturn or bubble-bursting would bring those numbers down substantially.
Thrive Capital, Notable Capital, and Sequoia Capital declined to comment for this piece.