Andreessen Horowitz

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.

Marc Andreessen wrote this in 2007. It’s still the truest startup law there is.

Announcing FurtherAI's $25M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz! When we signed the term sheet, the initial excitement quickly turned into a different feeling. A feeling of responsibility. Responsibility to insurance industry — to automate the busy work. Responsibility to our investors who trusted us with one of the biggest Series A rounds in insurance AI. Responsibility to FurtherAI team that’s giving it everything, every single day. Over the last 18 months, we’ve sat side-by-side with underwriters, brokers, and claims teams - watching how much time gets stolen by busywork. Today, FurtherAI is live with leading carriers, MGAs, and brokers automating workflows like submissions processing, underwriting audit, claims intake and many more. This raise is about more insurance teams get their time back and enterprises to generate real value with AI. Our job is simple: – Make our customers incredibly successful – Build a launchpad for every team member’s growth – Keep pushing the insurance AI category forward Incredibly grateful to all the people who’ve shaped the product, challenged our ideas, and helped us get here. Thank you to Joe Schmidt IV and Angela for trusting us with this responsibility and to our existing investors for doubling down on our mission. Further 🚀 Aman & Sashank cc: Nexus Venture Partners, Xceedance, BrokerTech Ventures, South Park Commons, Converge VC, Pioneer Fund, Y Combinator and others!

Insurance is one of the largest and most regulated industries in the world. And yet, much of it still runs on PDFs, spreadsheets, and email. FurtherAI is working to change that. Aman Gour, Sashank Gondala, and their team are building AI that actually understands insurance. They’ve already shipped flexible AI primitives that let carriers and brokers automate complex, document-heavy workflows safely. And early adopters are seeing meaningful improvements in speed, accuracy, and underwriting efficiency. For decades, replacing legacy insurance systems has been too risky and too costly. Now, LLMs make it possible to handle the unstructured, text-based work the industry runs on: comparing policy documents, processing claims, and completing audits. After years of adding people to manage complexity, the leverage is finally shifting to code. We’re thrilled to lead FurtherAI’s Series A, as they continue turning the industry’s tangled paper trails into clean, secure, AI-native workflows. https://lnkd.in/dHWQV4-s