Andreessen Horowitz

Overview

Andreessen Horowitz, known as a16z, is the American venture capital firm that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz founded in July 2009 with a $300 million debut fund, and that grew into one of Silicon Valley’s largest venture firms, managing more than $90 billion in assets after a record $15 billion fundraise in January 2026 (Worth; Reuters). The firm set out to remake venture capital on the model of a Hollywood talent agency, backing founders with operating help rather than capital alone, and its early bets included Facebook, Airbnb, GitHub, and Coinbase (Worth; Reuters).

Founding and the talent-agency model

Andreessen and Horowitz were not outsiders when they launched the firm on July 6, 2009. Andreessen had led the team that created Mosaic, one of the first internet browsers, before co-founding Netscape, where he hired Horowitz as a project manager; together they went on to co-found the software company Opsware, which they sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007 (Worth). In their launch announcement they touted that they had started three companies and been angel investors in 45 startups over the previous five years — a signal that both knew what it was like to be an entrepreneur raising money in Silicon Valley (Worth). The timing looked unpromising: venture firms invested just $3 billion in the first quarter of 2009, the lowest quarterly amount since 1997, according to National Venture Capital Association and PwC data (Worth).

The firm’s distinguishing pitch was operational, not financial. Andreessen Horowitz modeled itself on the Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists Agency, offering founders what Worth describes as an enormous amount of guidance and career advice, and portfolio founders cited that help as a deciding factor: Okta’s co-founders said they wanted long-term partners with experience building large enterprise software companies, and PagerDuty’s co-founder credited the firm’s brand and hands-on expertise with executive recruiting (Worth). The early record gave the model credibility. The firm led Okta’s $10 million Series A in July 2010, its first cloud investment, and raised a $650 million second fund by the end of that year, taking its total raised to nearly $1 billion in two years (Worth). It invested $60 million of a $112 million round for Airbnb in 2011, put $100 million into GitHub in 2012 — its largest investment to that point — and led Lyft’s $60 million Series C in 2013 (Worth). When Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion in June 2018, the firm reportedly made $1 billion from the sale (Worth).

Specialized funds and the road to $90 billion

From a single generalist fund, Andreessen Horowitz expanded into sector-specific vehicles, each marking a new chapter in Silicon Valley itself. It launched a $200 million bio fund in November 2015, deliberately avoiding the blood-testing company Theranos and investing instead in companies such as Ciitizen, Omada Health, and PatientPing (Worth). In June 2018 it established a $350 million crypto fund, bringing in Katie Haun, a former federal prosecutor focused on fraud and cybercrime, as its first female general partner (Worth). The 2019 IPO wave — Lyft in March, then PagerDuty and Pinterest in April, in which the firm held roughly 6%, 18%, and nearly 10% respectively before the offerings — showed how far the early bets had travelled (Worth). That same year the firm registered as a financial adviser to handle a portfolio now spanning cryptocurrencies, real estate, and more, while its managing partner Jeff Jordan insisted the move did not change its job: it was and would remain a venture capital firm (Worth).

The fundraising arc after 2021 shows the scale of the transformation. In January 2022 the firm closed $9 billion across three funds — $2.5 billion for venture fund 8, $5 billion for growth fund 3, and $1.5 billion for bio fund 4 — on top of a $2.2 billion crypto fund and a $400 million seed fund raised in 2021 (TechCrunch; Crunchbase News). In April 2024 it raised $7.2 billion across five funds, with $3.75 billion for growth, $1.25 billion for infrastructure, $1 billion for apps, and $600 million each for games and for American Dynamism, a strategy targeting national-interest areas such as aerospace, defense, public safety, education, and supply chain — and no new money for crypto (AFP via TechXplore). Then in January 2026 came the firm’s largest fundraise ever: more than $15 billion across five funds, including $6.75 billion for scaling startups, $1.7 billion for AI infrastructure, and $1.12 billion for national-interest investing, a haul the firm said represented more than 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the United States in 2025 and took assets under management past $90 billion (Reuters). Co-founder Ben Horowitz framed the raise as a contest with China, saying it was “fundamentally important for humanity that America wins” (Reuters).

A repeat backer of Anysphere

One through-line in the firm’s recent AI investing is its repeat backing of Anysphere, the maker of the AI coding assistant Cursor. In June 2025 Anysphere raised $900 million at a $9.9 billion valuation in a round led by returning investor Thrive Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and DST Global, by which point the company had surpassed $500 million in annualized recurring revenue (TechCrunch). Five months later, Anysphere announced a $2.3 billion Series D at a $29.3 billion valuation, led by Coatue with Accel, with Andreessen Horowitz again among the existing investors participating — more than tripling the Series C valuation in half a year, as the company crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue (Institutional Investor). The pattern — an early conviction bet, then repeated follow-on participation as the valuation multiplied — is the same shape as the firm’s earliest successes, from its $100 million GitHub investment to its backing of Facebook and Airbnb: identify a category-defining software company early, then keep funding it as it scales.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state the firm’s headquarters city, office list, portfolio count, or investment returns: none appear in the sources read in full. It does not assert Andreessen Horowitz’s participation in Anysphere’s Series A or Series B rounds, because only the 2025 Series C and Series D participations were confirmed in sources read in full. It describes the roughly $20 billion AI megafund as reported, not closed: Reuters reported in April 2025 that the firm was seeking it, and the January 2026 raise is a separate, confirmed fundraise. And it does not present the firm’s own blog-post characterization of its fundraising share — more than 18% of United States venture dollars in 2025 — as independently verified; it is reported here as the firm’s own claim via Reuters.