All posts tagged: a16z

Katie Haun raises B for new venture funds

Katie Haun raises $1B for new venture funds

Published by skeptic

Former Andreessen Horowitz investor Katie Haun announced on Monday in a press release that her firm has raised $1 billion across new funds to continue its thesis of backing crypto and blockchain. The capital will be spread across startups at early and later stages, Bloomberg reported, and, within the crypto and blockchain space, it will be used to back startups focused on alternative assets (like gold and other commodities), the agentic economy, and financial services. The firm hopes to deploy the capital globally over the next two to three years. Haun left a16z in late 2021 and launched her own venture firm shortly after, in 2022. The firm handles more than $2 billion in assets under management, estimates PitchBook, and its investments include Palmer Luckey’s Erebor Bank and the crypto finance company Ellipsis Labs.  Source link

Financial risk management platform Pillar raises M seed in round led by a16z

Financial risk management platform Pillar raises $20M seed in round led by a16z

Published by skeptic

Pillar, a platform that helps commodity-driven businesses (like those in metals, food, and airline companies) manage financial risk, announced Tuesday a $20 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.  Others in the seed round include Crucible Capital, Gallery Ventures, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. The company has raised $23 million to date. Pillar, founded in 2023, automates hedging processes for such businesses. Hedging is when a company places a trade that can offset or cancel out losses from other priced trades. Geopolitics has not been kind to the commodities market, which has seen much volatility in the past year.  Harsha Ramesh, the company’s co-founder and CEO (founded alongside Chinmay Deshpande, the company’s CTO), said the company uses AI to ingest and parse data from client contracts, cash flows, inventories, ERP software, spreadsheets, and even WhatsApp messages to “continuously analyze exposure across commodities, FX, and freight.” It can then build and manage a hedge portfolio for its clients, and adjust positions automatically based on “market conditions, volatility, and the client’s risk tolerance,” Ramesh continued. The platform …

Yupp.ai shuts down after raising M from a16z crypto’s Chris Dixon

Yupp.ai shuts down after raising $33M from a16z crypto’s Chris Dixon

Published by skeptic

Sometimes an apparently good idea, a big raise from a big-name VC, and a sea of well-connected angel investors is not enough. Less than a year after launching, Yupp.ai is closing its business, co-founders Pankaj Gupta and Gilad Mishne announced on Tuesday. Yupp offered a crowdsourced AI model-picking service. It allowed consumers to test and compare results from a supply of 800 AI models for free, including the state-of-the-art ones from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic. Yupp would return multiple replies from the prompt request, including information or images, and users would offer feedback on which models worked best for them and why. The idea was to generate anonymized data on what people actually need from AI that the model makers would then pay for. Yupp said it signed up 1.3 million users and collected millions of preferences every month. It even had a leaderboard. The company said it also had a few AI labs as customers. But alas, “we didn’t reach a strong enough product-market fit” to survive, in part because AI models improved by such …

Have money, will travel: a16z’s hunt for the next European unicorn

Have money, will travel: a16z’s hunt for the next European unicorn

Published by skeptic

Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently revealed he took nine flights from NYC to Stockholm in one year. That wasn’t just to visit Lovable, a portfolio company, but also to look for other future Swedish unicorns before they cross the Atlantic. This all came to light when news emerged that a16z had led a $2.3 million pre-seed round into Dentio, a Swedish startup that uses AI to help dentists’ practices with admin work. While this is a small check for a firm that just announced new funds totaling $15 billion, it confirms that U.S. VCs are actively seeking deal flow outside of the U.S., even without local offices. Stockholm is a natural stop for a16z, which previously achieved significant returns from backing Skype, cofounded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, a significant number of fast-growing startups have been created in the Swedish capital, and the VC heavyweight tracked down where many of them were coming from.  “We spend a lot of time developing a deep understanding of specific markets and knowing where …

How to get into a16z’s super-competitive Speedrun startup accelerator program

How to get into a16z’s super-competitive Speedrun startup accelerator program

Published by skeptic

Without a doubt, one of the hottest new startup accelerators in tech right now is Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun program. Launched in 2023, the accelerator has an acceptance rate of less than 1%. In a January blog post, the program said that over 19,000 startups pitched and fewer than 0.4% were accepted into the latest cohort.  The program used to focus on gaming startups, then expanded into entertainment and media, and is now a “horizontal program,” Joshua Lu, the program’s general manager and a partner at a16z, told TechCrunch. Today, founders of any type of startup can apply, and the program runs for about 12 weeks in San Francisco. It once had a program in Los Angeles, but Lu said the focus will be on SF from now on.  There are two cohorts a year, and around 50 to 70 startups are accepted into each. The program invests up to $1 million into each company, though the downside is that it’s a bit pricey. It typically invests $500,000 up front in exchange for 10% of the …

A16z just raised .7B for AI infrastructure. Here’s where it’s going.

A16z just raised $1.7B for AI infrastructure. Here’s where it’s going.

Published by skeptic

Andreessen Horowitz just raised a whopping ⁠new $15 billion in funding⁠. And a $1.7 billion chunk of that is going to its ⁠infrastructure team⁠, the one responsible for some of its biggest, most prominent AI investments including Black Forrest Labs, Cursor, OpenAI, ⁠ElevenLabs⁠, Ideogram, ⁠Fal⁠ and dozens of others.   A16z ⁠general partner with the infra team Jennifer Li⁠ (who oversees such investments as ElevenLabs – just valued at $11 billion); Ideagram and Fal, has a clear thesis on where the team is looking to spend it’s latest chunk of cash.  Watch as Venture and Startups editor Julie Bort talks with Li on ⁠Equity⁠ about where a16z sees this AI super cycle going next, including the talent crunch hitting AI-native startups, why search infrastructure matters more than people think, and what kinds of companies are actually getting funded right now.  Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.  Source link

a16z partner Kofi Ampadu to leave firm after TxO program pause

a16z partner Kofi Ampadu to leave firm after TxO program pause

Published by skeptic

Kofi Ampadu, the partner at a16z who led the firm’s Talent x Opportunity (TxO) fund and program, has left the firm, according to an email he sent to staff that TechCrunch obtained. This comes months after the firm paused TxO and laid off most of its staff. “During my time at the firm, I was deeply grateful for the opportunity and the trust to lead this work,” Ampadu wrote in the email, sent Friday afternoon, with the subject line “Closing My a16z Chapter.” “Identifying out-of-network entrepreneurs and supporting them as they sharpened their ideas, raised capital, and grew into confident leaders was one of the most meaningful experiences of my career,” he wrote. Ampadu led the program, which launched in 2020, for over four years until its pause last November, taking over for the initial leader, Nait Jones. Afterward, Ampadu seems to have worked at a16z’s latest accelerator, Speedrun. Ampadu’s departure perhaps signals the end of the TxO chapter. The fund and program focused on supporting underserved founders by providing access to tech networks and …