Andreessen Horowitz

Hayek & the power of markets. Prediction markets explained: https://lnkd.in/dTVAAaR7

Every era has an organizing idea. For modernism, it was nation and cause. For postmodernism, risk and rendering. For this one? Prediction. Prediction organizes around information: who knows what, and when. As AI and markets fuse, advantage shifts to those who can turn foresight into infrastructure.

Today we are announcing that a16z is co-leading the Series D in Kalshi, a regulated exchange for trading on prediction markets. More in my blog post: https://lnkd.in/gZBrJkxs

We’re thrilled to be co-leading Kalshi's Series D. Prediction markets have established themselves not only as a new asset class, but as an extremely useful tool for predicting the future. And Kalshi is the leading company in the space. Not only does it have more volume than every other prediction market combined, but it’s the fastest growing tech company in the world outside AI. Kalshi also announced today that they've expanded globally to 140 countries, making them the world's only unified global prediction market. We’re excited to partner with Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara as they scale this category-defining, world-changing company.

Marc Andreessen: "A top-tier VC is a bridge loan of credibility, at a point in time when a startup maybe deserves it, but just doesn’t have it yet." That credibility gets converted into talent, money, and brand. It’s how early startups borrow reputation before they can earn it.

As AI infrastructure companies climb the stack, startups can’t out-compute or out-scale them. Instead, they can compete where scale doesn’t matter: by building moats through scarcity. Defensibility comes from domains of data that are private, trusted, and hard to replicate. Marc Andrusko and Alastair (Alex) Rampell argue that the edge in AI belongs to those with permission, built on trust and access.

We are excited to welcome Raghu Raghuram as a16z's newest General Partner. More from Ben Horowitz: Nearly 30 years ago, I hired Raghu Raghuram to be a product manager at Netscape. While I do not remember much from those days, I keenly remember how smart he was. He was also eager to learn absolutely everything. The problem for me was that he was so smart that I did not have much to teach him about the products or technology, so I narrowed our conversations to leadership. As with everything else, he was eager to learn and quickly became the top product manager in the organization. I had a glimpse, but I honestly had no idea what a great leader he would become. I watched from afar as he took over product leadership at VMware. That was quite a feat as the company was founded by my friend Diane Greene, who held her product people to the highest standard in the industry. Naturally, he went on to become Chief Executive Officer where he grew VMware into a platform company with over $13B in revenue and more than 300K customers in 60+ countries; shepherded industry-disrupting acquisitions such as Nicira; and deftly and uniquely steered VMware from on-premise to multi-cloud technology. As a result, he became known as the greatest infrastructure strategist in the game. Ultimately, he led the company through challenging times to the largest software exit ever in the sale to Broadcom.  He is an amazing strategist and leader, and I am proud of my small association with him. That is why I am thrilled to announce that Raghu has joined Andreessen Horowitz to push us forward in 3 important areas with 3 significant roles: - A General Partner on our AI Infra team where his incredible infrastructure expertise will serve us well. - A General Partner on our Growth team where his comprehensive understanding of how to go to market, scale organizations, globalize, and navigate industry changes will be a huge boost for our growth companies. - A Managing Partner and my consigliere who will help me run the firm – I could not be more excited to have a partner whose management and leadership skills exceed my own in many areas. This is a dream come true for me and a giant step forward for Andreessen Horowitz.

Sam Altman says the next chapter of AI will go beyond building smarter models: It will be about expanding the infrastructure that powers them at planetary scale. The real race now is to engineer the foundations strong enough to hold AI’s economic gravity. The winners will be the businesses building with that scale in mind.

For decades, code was designed, typed, and managed in systems built for humans. Now, code is being generated by agents. That shift moves the bottleneck from writing code to running it. If software can be created through a prompt, the challenge becomes execution: how to integrate, manage, and scale AI-generated code safely and reliably. That’s what Relace is building: the infrastructure layer where models and systems are co-optimized for code generation. Their small, specialized models are paired with infrastructure layers that surface the right context in seconds and apply edits at unprecedented speeds. Already powering dozens of teams, Relace is laying the foundation for software-on-demand. We’re proud to lead Relace’s $23M Series A, alongside Matrix Partners and Y Combinator, as Eitan Borgnia, Preston Zhou, and their team build the backbone for the next generation of software creation.