2025 Year in Review: Analysis of Riverside’s SPV Activity

As we close the books on 2025, we're excited to share a comprehensive look at our investment activity over the past year. This analysis provides transparency into our deployment figures, portfolio composition, and the trends that shaped our SPV activity.

*Please note all data/figures below are reflective of only Riverside Ventures. This does not include any co-syndicated deals via other syndicates.”

Portfolio Overview

In 2025, we completed 83 investments totaling $26,329,219 in deployed capital.

• 49 SPVs were follow ons (to existing portfolio companies)

• 24 SPVs were new portfolio companies we invested into for the first time

Our average SPV size was $317,220, with a median investment of $199,994. This reflects our approach of high volume, high quality investing across a range of opportunities and check sizes.

The range of investment sizes demonstrated our flexibility in deploying capital: 

• our smallest SPV was $40,044

• our largest reached $2,707,268 

The majority of our investments (49 out of 83, or 59%) fell in the $100K to $500K range, representing our core check size sweet spot. 6 investments exceeded $1 million—while only 4 were under $50,000.

Investment Pace and Timing

Our investment activity remained consistent throughout 2025, with meaningful deployment in every month of the year. January emerged as our most active month by deal count with 12 investments closed. When measured by capital deployed, October led with $4.3 million invested, followed by September at $3.7 million and February at $3.6 million.

Looking at quarterly trends, Q1 delivered 26 investments and $8.4 million deployed—our largest quarter by both deal count and capital. Q4 closed with 21 investments and $6.4 million in capital. Q3 capital deployment was $7.5 million across 20 investments, driven by several larger opportunities that came to market. Q2 saw 16 investments totaling $3.9 million.

Investment Stage Breakdown

Our 2025 portfolio spans the full venture capital lifecycle, from Pre-Seed through late-stage growth rounds. Aggregate by stage categories:

• Early-stage investments (Pre-Seed through Series A+) → comprised 23 deals representing 13.3% of capital, or $3.5 million. 

• Growth/Later-stage investments (Series B through Pre-IPO) → totaled 60 deals and 86.8% of capital, or $22.8 million. 

For the past few years, we’ve continued to see the shift or more later-stage deals and capital deployment versus early-stage. 4-5 years ago, this was a very different story.

Market and Sector Allocation

Our 2025 portfolio reflects a strong conviction in transformative technology sectors, with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning emerging as the dominant theme. AI/ML investments commanded 54.0% of our total capital ($14.2 million across 39 deals). This concentration represents a deliberate strategic bet on the AI infrastructure and application layers that we believe will drive significant value creation over the coming decade. 

Aerospace emerged as a significant allocation, capturing 13.4% of capital ($3.5 million across 7 deals). Beyond AI and Aerospace, our portfolio achieved meaningful diversification across high-growth verticals. HR & Recruiting technology attracted 9.6% of capital ($2.5 million) across 3 investments, representing larger conviction bets in the future of work. Finance represented 5.4% ($1.4 million), followed by Hardware at 4.8% ($1.3 million) and Blockchain/Crypto at 4.3% ($1.1 million).

Additional sectors receiving meaningful allocation included Payments (3.3%), Food & Beverages (3.2%), Cleantech (2.2%), and Social platforms (1.7%). The remaining sectors—Consumer, Healthcare, Gaming, Media/Entertainment, and Health—each represented less than 2% of capital.

Deal Structure: SAFEs versus Priced Rounds

Our investment activity in 2025 skewed heavily toward priced equity rounds, which represented 83.1% of all investments (69 deals) and 91.1% of capital deployed ($24.0 million). 

SAFE investments comprised 16.9% of our deals (14 investments) and 8.9% of capital ($2.3 million). These were concentrated in our earlier-stage investments, particularly at the Seed and Pre-Seed stages, where SAFEs remain the preferred instrument for their simplicity and speed of execution. 

The average SAFE investment was approximately $168,000, compared to $348,000 for priced rounds, reflecting the natural correlation between company maturity and deal size.

Limited Partner Participation

Across our 83 SPVs, we saw robust participation from our LP base, with a total of 2,287 LP commitments (not individual LPs) over the course of the year. The average SPV attracted 28 LPs, with a median of 22, demonstrating consistent engagement across our investor network. Individual SPV participation ranged widely based on deal characteristics, with our largest SPVs attracting 95 LPs while more specialized opportunities saw more concentrated participation.

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✍️ Written by Zachary and Alex