Vinod Khosla, founder of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, who topped the inaugural Forbes Midas List in 2001, has again claimed the top spot in the 2026 list featuring 17 Indian Americans.

Khosla, who topped the 2001 list for early bets on the startups building the infrastructure that underpinned the early internet, Forbes noted, “is again the world’s top investor for another generational bet: writing the first institutional check for OpenAI, then a not-for-profit research lab, back in 2019.”

Celebrating the 17 Indian Americans on the 2026 list, leading community organization Indiaspora said their selection reflects “the growing and indispensable role Indian Americans play in the startup ecosystems powering Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship hubs around the world.”

Top ranked Khosla is making his 19th appearance on the list. Khosla Ventures invests in experimental technologies such as biomedicine, robotics, and was the first venture firm to invest in OpenAI, valued at $852 billion as of March 2026, after closing a record-breaking $122 billion funding round.

Khosla, who cofounded computer hardware firm Sun Microsystems in 1982, spent 18 years at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins before launching his own fund.

Ranked 3, Eric Vishria, a general partner at Benchmark, led investments in Confluent and Amplitude, both of which IPO’ed in 2021. Other notable companies he’s written checks into include Benchling and Contentful. Before joining Benchmark, Vishria was cofounder and CEO of social web browser Rockmelt, which was scooped up by Yahoo in 2013 for $70 million.

Ranked 10, Index partner Shardul Shah led the firm’s investments in the cloud security company Wiz, which Google acquired for $32 billion in 2026. Focusing on security, cloud infrastructure and enterprise software, Shah co-led the Series A for monitoring platform Datadog in 2012, then valued at $17 million (IPO’d in 2019 at $8.7 billion).

READ: Six Indian Americans among Fortune’s 2026 Most Powerful Women (June 3, 2026)

Ranked 15, Saurabh Gupta, managing partner and cofounder of DST Global, oversees investments in companies like Chime, Waymo, xAI and AI research startup Periodic Labs. Gupta’s early bets include Chime, which listed in May 2025 at a $18.4 billion valuation but now trades with a $6.8 billion market cap.

Lightspeed Venture Partners founder Ravi Mhatre comes next at rank 16. Making one of the biggest bets of his career last year, the Menlo Park-based investor led back-to-back rounds for AI startup Anthropic: first at a $60 billion valuation in March 2025, and then at $180 billion in September 2025. That makes Lightspeed one of the largest shareholders in the maker of AI chatbot Claude, now in talks to raise at $900 billion.

Ranked 19, Delhi-born Hemant Taneja, who immigrated to the U.S. at age 15, now styles $43 billion venture fund General Catalyst as a “global investment and transformation firm.”

Taneja’s General Catalyst teamed up with billionaire activist investor Nelson Peltz last year to mount a $7.4 billion takeover offer for listed mutual fund giant Janus Henderson, which manages over $493 billion in assets.

Ranked 32, Antonio Gracias, founder and CEO of Chicago-based growth equity firm Valor Equity Partners, which has $16 billion in gross assets, earlier founded MG Capital in 1995. Much of Gracias’ wealth comes from his shares of Tesla, where he served as a director from 2007 to 2021 after becoming one of Tesla’s first institutional investors in 2005.

Ranked 39, Greenoaks founder Neil Mehta led Greenoaks’ early investment in Korean ecommerce startup Coupang, remaining on its board through its $60 billion IPO in March 2021; Coupang had a $28 billion market cap as of May 2026.

Mehta’s Greenoaks led Series C and D rounds in Wiz, and participated in every one of the company’s growth rounds prior to its $32 billion acquisition by Google in March 2026.

Ranked 50, Ashvin Bachireddy, a managing partner at SV Angel, has made a string of investments into now famous AI labs like OpenAI (valued at $852 billion), Anthropic (valued at $380 billion) and Mistral (valued at $14 billion). In January 2025 the San Francisco-based firm raised a new $330 million fund.

Ranked 51, generalist investor Navin Chaddha makes his 18th Midas List appearance this year. As managing director at Mayfield, Chaddha leads the firm’s venture practice and has backed 18 companies that went on to go public, including Lyft, Poshmark and developer tools company HashiCorp.

Ranked 73, Asheem Chandna is a general partner at Greylock Partners, which he joined in 2003. His track record includes the blockbuster public exits of Palo Alto Networks, Arista Networks and AppDynamics, which Cisco bought for $3.7 billion in 2017.

He invested in Rubrik when it was pre-revenue and has been on the board since 2015. When Rubrik went public in 2024, Greylock’s stake more than returned its $1 billion fund. It now has a market cap of $13.3 billion.

Ranked 85, Dharmesh Thakker, is a general partner at Battery Ventures. He backed Databricks, which was valued at $134 billion in February 2026, as well as companies like Gong (valued at $4.5 billion), Baseten (valued at $5 billion), Reflection AI (reportedly raising at $25 billion) and SambaNova (which last raised $350 million in February 2026).

READ: 11 Indian Americans among Forbes 250 America’s Greatest Innovators (February 25, 2026)

Ranked 89, Chetan Puttagunta, a general partner at Benchmark, led its investment in Cursor, which agreed to be acquired by SpaceX at $60 billion in April 2026. Puttagunta has also invested in data integration platform Airbyte ($1.5 billion valuation) and fintech firm Modern Treasury (over $2 billion valuation).

Ranked 94, Aneel Ranadive, the son of Sacramento Kings owner and software billionaire Vivek Ranadive, is Soma Capital founder. A Midas Seed lister in 2023 and 2024, he makes his Midas List debut in 2026.

Soma has seeded more than 40 startups valued above $1 billion, including Ramp at $32 billion, Kalshi at $22 billion, Deel at $17.3 billion, Rippling at $16.8 billion and Mercor at $10 billion.

Ranked 98, Midas Seed alum, Haystack founder Semil Shah makes his Midas List debut thanks to early bets on DoorDash, Figma, HashiCorp, Carta and Applied Intuition.

DoorDash, in which Shah invested in its $2.5 million seed round in 2013, has a market cap of $69 billion as of May 2026.

He also backed Figma, which had a $11.4 billion market cap as of May 2026, and HashiCorp, which IBM acquired for $6.4 billion in February 2025.

Ranked 99, Rahul Mehta joined Yuri Milner’s DST Global in 2008 prior to the fund’s launch and was involved in early investments such as Facebook, Spotify and Twitter. To date, he’s led eight investments that have exited at valuations over $10 billion through IPO or M&A, including DoorDash and Robinhood.

Ranked 100, Salil Deshpande founded Bain-backed Uncorrelated Ventures in 2019 with a focus on infrastructure software. The firm has invested $745 million across three funds and over 100 companies, including 20 unicorns. AI infrastructure company Crusoe Energy Systems closed a round at a $10 billion valuation in October 2025.