A16z ventures into new territory

Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, is rewriting the rules of venture capital. According to a post by Ben Horowitz, its co-founder, it raised $15bn last year – more than 18% of all venture capital dollars raised in the United States in 2025, and an astonishing concentration of money in a single venture firm. Across all its funds, a16z now manages a whopping $90bn, invested in over 1,000 companies.

Horowitz frames a16z’s goals in nationalistic and political terms. “Our mission is ensuring that America wins the next 100 years of technology,” he says. “That starts with winning the key architectures of the future: AI and crypto. It continues with applying those technologies to the key areas that generate human flourishing… and it culminates with the American government adopting these technologies.”

a16z current scale and politicisation (cofounder Marc Andreessen is a cheerleader for Donald Trump) has raised questions about whether it is truly doing venture, at least of the classic scrappy, risk-taking, entrepreneur-mentoring kind that first made Silicon Valley. But maybe small and scrappy (and politically uninterested) is no longer an option given the geopolitical imperatives driving innovation and the huge sums of capital needed for success.

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