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Tag: a16z

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

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    Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently revealed he took nine flights from NYC to Stockholm in one year. While his visits included stops at companies like Lovable — where he posted from its office — the trips were also about finding 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 innovation is emerging. In Sweden, that has meant closely tracking ecosystems like [SSE Business Lab] — the startup incubator of the Stockholm School of Economics — and the companies coming out of it,” Vasquez told TechCrunch.

    Like fintech giant Klarna, legal AI startup Legora, and e-scooter company Voi, Dentio is an alum of SSE Business Lab — a startup incubator that has produced several successful Swedish companies. The three former high school classmates Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li and Lukas Sjögren joined the incubator after reconnecting as students at both the SSE (Stockholm School of Economics) and KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), then joined the incubator with additional backing from KTH’s Innovation Launch program. They tackled a problem close to home: Li’s mom, a dentist, had told them how admin work detracted from clinical care.

    The trio intuited that they could leverage LLMs to help people like her — an idea that they also validated with her and her colleagues. This led them to Dentio’s initial product, a recording tool that uses AI to generate clinical notes. But it’s only a matter of time before AI scribes become a commodity product, and Dentio needs to prove its value to dentists so they aren’t tempted to switch providers when that happens, Afrasiabi said.

    Potential competitors include fellow Swedish startup Tandem Health, which raised a $50 million Series A round last year to support clinicians with AI across multiple medical specialties. Dentio, by contrast, focuses exclusively on dentists, but it believes it can still reach the scale VCs expect through international expansion

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    “Now we’re a team of seven people, and we think that it’s possible to build a unified way of handling administration all over Europe, and maybe even all over the world,” Afrasiabi said. While Europe’s healthcare systems are fragmented, they share similarities, and Dentio’s assumption is that what works in Sweden could work elsewhere in the EU.

    Dentio prominently features its “Made in Sweden” branding and emphasizes that “all relevant data is processed in Sweden and Finland in compliance with Swedish and EU law.” It signals data protection to privacy-conscious European customers. But it also signals potential to VCs — a callback to Sweden’s history of producing breakout companies.

    “We went to zero meetups. I reached out to zero investors,” Afrasiabi said. While the team was heads down building, the word spread out. “I think it was mostly through referrals and people talking to each other that the news got all the way over to the U.S.,” he said.

    This wasn’t happenstance: a16z has eyes around the world in order to spot these companies as early as local funds might, Vasquez said. “In Sweden for example, we partnered with top founders abroad like Fredrik Hjelm, founder of Voi, and Johannes Schildt, founder of Kry, by turning them into scouts and mapping the best local talent.”

    For Vasquez, who focuses on AI application investments for a16z, this isn’t just about Sweden, but about “a pattern of great global companies being born abroad and scaling quickly,” from Black Forest Labs in Germany to Manus, the Singapore-based AI startup recently acquired by Meta.

    Born and raised in El Salvador, he has also been spending time in São Paulo. “I’m really excited about what’s brewing in Brazil and across Latin America in AI,” he wrote on LinkedIn at the time. “I believe AI is the great equalizer,” he added. “Most people now have access to PhD-level intelligence on a phone, and ultimately, Silicon Valley is a state of mind.”

    Corrections: This story originally stated that a16z is an investor in Lovable owing to an editing error. The name of SSE’s incubator has also been corrected.

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    Anna Heim

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  • a16z partner Kofi Ampadu to leave firm after TxO program pause | TechCrunch

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    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 investment capital through a donor-advised fund. Though some founders spoke highly of the program, others criticized the controversial donor-advised structure. The program also launched a grant program in 2024 to provide $50,000 to nonprofits that help diverse founders.

    Its last cohort was in March 2025, and its indefinite pause came as many top tech names reframe, cut, or eliminate prior public commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We’ve reached out to a16z and Ampadu for comment.

    His full note below:

    I moved to the United States three months before my 11th birthday. One month later, I started 6th grade in a school more than 5,000 miles from my home, my friends, and everything familiar. Recently, my mom reminded me that my school required me to enroll as an English-as-a-Second-Language student. My memory immediately returned to how confused I felt. Even at 10 years old, I knew it made no sense that a kid from Ghana, an English-speaking country, was being asked to learn a language he already spoke fluently.

    This was a systems requirement, a blanketed assumption about what students from certain places could or could not do. That same type of systemic assumption is what we set out to challenge through the Talent x Opportunity Initiative. The venture ecosystem often relies on proxies such as schools, networks, and prior credentials, which can obscure exceptional founders who do not follow the most common paths. TxO invested in and supported these overlooked founders to bridge the gap between talent and opportunity.

    During my time at the firm, I was deeply grateful for the opportunity and the trust to lead this work. 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.

    As I move on to my next chapter, I leave with pride in what we built and gratitude for everyone who helped shape it. Thank you for the trust, the collaboration, and the belief in what is possible. There is more work to do and I am excited to keep building.

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    Dominic-Madori Davis

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  • What’s Next for AI? Andreessen Horowitz Founders Share Their Thoughts

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    Stocks of companies tied to artificial intelligence have been hitting stratospheric levels for over a year now, thrilling investors, but also causing concerns about a potential AI bubble. As startups close breathtaking funding rounds, like the $40 billion OpenAI collected in March of this year, fears of an AI bubble are growing – and some say a burst could be even bigger than the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s.

    The bubble theory is hotly debated. Some within the industry say they agree the investment landscape is bloated, including OpenAI co-founded Sam Altman. Other experts, like Goldman Sachs, however, say we’re not in one (yet) – and Fed Chair Jerome Powell has been skeptical of the bubble calls. As that debate rages, investors continue to fund AI startups.

    Few investors are in as deep as Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Their venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz (commonly called a16z) has sunk billions into the AI space. In April, it was reported the company was in early talks to raise a massive $20 billion AI-focused fund. The two investors recently came together at a16z’s Runtime conferences to talk about where AI can go beyond chatbots.

    Neither was willing to make any specific predictions about AI’s forthcoming capabilities, saying it’s too early to even imagine that. Andreessen likened AI to the personal computer in 1975, noting there was no way at that time to imagine what PCs would be capable of today. However, he expects similar levels of advancement – from a stronger starting point.

    AI, he said, is already approaching levels of human creativity – and while Andreessen would love to see humans continue to have superiority in that area, he thinks it’s unlikely. Tools like OpenAI’s Sora 2 video, for instance, are already capable of creating realistic scenes, animations, and special effects – and the introduction of AI Actress Tilly Norwood has caused an outcry and prompted debate in Hollywood. 

    “I wanna like hold out hope that there is still something special about human creativity,” he said. “And I certainly believe that, and I very much want to believe that. But, I don’t know. When I use these things, I’m like, Wow, they seem to be awfully smart and awfully creative. So I’m pretty convinced that they’re gonna clear the bar.”

    Horowitz agreed, saying that while AI might not currently create at the same level as human artists, whether painters or hip-hop performers, that’s largely due to how little it has learned so far. It’s just a matter of time before it has an equal or superior level of talent. And some artists are already looking to use AI to collaborate, he said.

    “With the current state of the technology, kind of the pre-training doesn’t have quite the right data to get to what you really wanna see, but, you know, it’s pretty good,” he said. “Hip hop guys are interested because it’s almost like a replay of what they did—they took other music and built new music out of it. AI is a fantastic creative tool. It way opens up the palette.”

    While AI can devour as many data sets as programmers throw at it, that doesn’t give the technology situational awareness. It is, in essence, book smarts vs. street smarts. But the robotics field is expanding quickly. Elon Musk and Tesla are working on humanoid robots and Robotics company 1X has already started to take preorders for a $20,000 humanoid robot that will ‘live’ and work around your home.

    Once that technology and AI are blended, Andreessen said, AI will see a significant jump in actionable intelligence.

    “When we put AI in physical objects that move around the world, you’re gonna be able to get closer to having that integrated intellectual, physical experience,” he said. “Robots that are gonna be able to gather a lot more real-world data. And so, maybe you can start to actually think about synthesizing a more advanced model of cognition.”

    While there are plenty of experts who warn the AI market could be in a bubble right now, including OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman, Horowitz dismisses the idea, saying bubbles occur when supply outstrips demand – and that’s not the case with AI.

    “We don’t have a demand problem right now,” he said. “The idea that we’re going to have a demand problem five years from now, to me, seems quite absurd. Could there be weird bottlenecks that appear, like we don’t have enough cooling or something like that? Maybe. But, right now, if you look at demand and supply and what’s going on and multiples against growth, it doesn’t look like a bubble at all to me.”

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    Chris Morris

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  • Kalshi hits $5B valuation days after rival Polymarket gets $2B NYSE backing at $8B | TechCrunch

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    Kalshi, a prediction market that allows people to bet on future events, announced that it raised over $300 million at a $5 billion valuation. The company’s value has increased 2.5x since its last fundraise just three months ago, when it was valued at $2 billion.

    The fresh capital came from Kalshi’s existing investor, Sequoia Capital, with new investor Andreessen Horowitz co-leading the round. Paradigm Ventures, CapitalG, and Coinbase Ventures also participated.

    Kalshi also revealed that consumers in 140 countries can now make bets on its platform.

    The prediction market is seeing a dramatic surge in activity: Kalshi is set to reach $50 billion in annualized trading volume, up significantly from the approximately $300 million volume posted last year, the New York Times reported.

    Kalshi’s fundraise announcement follows one made just days earlier by archrival Polymarket, which revealed that it had secured an investment of up to $2 billion from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, at a pre-money valuation of $8 billion. The deal valued Polymarket at $8 billion pre-money, a monumental increase from its $1 billion valuation only two months earlier in August.

    Both Kalshi and Polymarket rose to prominence last year, drawing significant attention for their prediction markets on the presidential election outcome.

    Polymarket has been barred from serving U.S. residents since 2022, following a settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). In July, the company acquired a derivatives exchange and a clearing house. The move helped Polymarket receive the right to reenter the U.S. market. Last month, the company’s CEO and founder, Shayne Coplan, said on X: “Polymarket has been given the green light to go live in the USA by the CFTC.”

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    Kalshi secured the right for Americans to use its platform after successfully suing the CFTC last year.

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    Marina Temkin

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  • 3 Surprising Takeaways From Andreessen Horowitz’s AI Spending Report

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    Startups offering AI-powered business solutions are emerging at a rapid pace this year, as companies big and small rush to take advantage of the tech in order to develop new products and boost efficiency. But which of these startups are winning the battle for enterprise dollars? A new report from a16z and fintech company Mercury attempts to answer that question.  

    The report was created by analyzing transactions made through Mercury’s business expense platforms between June and August, and then ranking the companies that received the highest amount of enterprise spending.

    Unsurprisingly, OpenAI was the top company on the list, with Anthropic trailing in second. But other startups, which often use the AI models developed by these labs, are also gaining traction. 

    Here’s a look at three surprising stories that emerged from the report.  

    A vibe coding split 

    Despite being founded in 2016, it wasn’t until late last year that Replit’s growth took off. The company, which placed at number three on a16z’s list, credits most of its good fortune to Agent, a vibe coding tool that can turn natural language prompts into working applications and websites. Since the debut of Agent, Replit’s annual recurring revenue has increased from $2.8 million to over $150 million. 

    Other vibe coding companies that have received significant money from enterprises include Cursor (number six), Lovable (number 18), and Emergent (number 48). According to a16z researchers, Replit generated 15x more revenue from enterprise customers than Lovable, which has been much more popular with everyday consumers. An earlier a16z report, published in August, found that Lovable’s website gets significantly more unique monthly visits than Replit. 

    The venture capital firm’s researchers theorized this split in Replit and Lovable’s customer base is due to a difference in focus. Lovable has focused its efforts on quickly generating user interfaces and components, while Replit “goes beyond front-end design by enabling the development of enterprise-grade, fully functional apps, agents, and automations.” 

    Cluely goes big 

    One of the biggest surprises on the list is Cluely’s placement, at number 26. Roy Lee and Neel Shanmugam founded Cluely earlier this year; they are two former Columbia University students who were suspended for creating a tool that used AI to help students cheat during interviews with tech companies. 

    Rather than apologize to Columbia, Lee and Shanmugam decided to move to San Francisco and turn their tool into a business. Cluely launched in April with a cringe-inducing video in which Lee uses the app to lie to a woman about his age while on a date. 

    In practice, Cluely operates as a desktop app that provides users with AI-generated insights before, during, and after meetings. Before meetings, Cluely generates a report containing details on the meeting’s attendees. During meetings, Cluely provides live insights and even offers suggestions for what users should say or ask at any given moment. After meetings, the app generates follow-up emails and notes based on the meeting’s content.  

    It’s also notable that Cluely is an a16z portfolio company. In June, the firm announced that it had led a $15 million series A round in the company. Cluely has been criticized on social media for prioritizing viral marketing over actual product quality, but according to the a16z report, it has found an audience in the enterprise. 

    Vibe coding has been the dominant story of enterprise AI use over the past few months, but the report also found that some AI-powered media offerings are finding success. Freepik, a graphic design company founded in 2010, notched the number four spot. 

    The company started as a search engine for stock images, and then started selling stock images of its own. In 2023, following the release of powerful AI-powered image generators like OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 and Midjourney (also on the list at number 28), Freepik pivoted to AI-generated stock photos. 

    Just under Freepik, at number five, is another creative tools company, ElevenLabs. The company offers highly-advanced AI voice solutions that enable users to turn text into speech, change the sound of their voice, create an AI-powered clone of their own voice, and develop voice-based AI agents that can handle customer support work. This demonstrates the growing impact of AI beyond coding, with creative tools like Freepik and ElevenLabs finding significant success in the enterprise market.

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    Ben Sherry

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  • Exclusive: Naveen Rao’s new AI hardware startup targets $5B valuation with backing from a16z, sources say

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    Naveen Rao, who was formerly the head of artificial intelligence at Databricks, is in talks to raise $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation for a new startup called Unconventional, Inc., that’s building a new type of computer, according to four people familiar with discussions. 

    Andreessen Horowitz has agreed to lead the investment, and Lightspeed and Lux Capital are also participating in the deal, two of the sources said, although none of those VC firms responded to our request for comment. Databricks is also said to be investing in Rao’s new company, Bloomberg reported last month. 

    Rao has already raised hundreds of millions and plans to begin building the startup without waiting for the full $1 billion round to close, our sources said. He plans to raise the rest of the capital in installments, a funding approach commonly referred to as a “tranched” round. 

    Rao declined to comment, although he did publicly acknowledge the new startup on X last week, confirming its name and describing its hoped-for product as “rethinking the foundations of a computer to build a new substrate for intelligence that is as efficient as biology. Brain Scale Efficiency without the biological baggage!”

    Databricks acquired Rao’s previous startup, MosaicML in 2023, for $1.3 billion. Founded by Rao in 2020 with a focus on training and deploying large AI models, MosaicML raised $33.7 million from investors, including Lux Capital, DCVC, Playground Global, and Samsung Next, according to PitchBook. Prior to MosaicML, Rao co-founded the machine learning platform Nervana Systems, which Intel Corp. acquired in 2016 for reportedly more than $400 million. 

    Rao, who spent over two years as VP of AI at Databricks (now valued at $100 billion and generating $4 billion in ARR), left the company last month to focus on his new startup, according to his LinkedIn profile and earlier reporting by Bloomberg.

    Our sources say Rao’s vision will essentially compete with Nvidia by designing a novel AI machine that includes both custom silicon chips and server infrastructure. 

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    Marina Temkin

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  • a16z-backed Rewind pivots to build AI-powered pendant to record your conversations | TechCrunch

    a16z-backed Rewind pivots to build AI-powered pendant to record your conversations | TechCrunch

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    In 2022, Rewind had just raised $10 million from a16z and was building a personal data recording service that promised to privately record your activity and let you search through your own history. But that was before OpenAI launched ChatGPT.

    Today, generative AI can make what Rewind had built previously — a searchable record of your activity — far more useful. It’s not so surprising, then, to see the startup pivoting to integrate AI more deeply into its product. The company has rebranded to “Limitless,” and is now offering an AI-powered meeting suite and a hardware pendant that can record your conversations.

    Company co-founder Dan Siroker first posted the idea of a conversation-recording pendant last October and started accepting orders at $59. In January, he posted that the company had finalized a design and aims to ship the product in Q4 2024.

    Siroker posted the final design this week, along with the news of the company’s pivot. The $99 pendant was posted on X earlier this week. The company is accepting preorders and aims to ship the first batch in August. Siroker said that the company plans to honor the initial preorders at $59. Earlier on Wednesday, he posted that the startup has already received more than 10,000 preorders for the product.

    Product features and the pivot

    The Limitless pendant can easily attach to your shirt like a wireless mic, or tie it like a necklace with a string and record conversations. The primary use case is recording and transcribing meetings, so you don’t have to take notes. The company claims that the device is weather-proof, has a 100-hour battery life and can be charged easily through a USB-C port.

    The hardware also has a “consent mode,” which doesn’t record the other person in the conversation unless they expressly agree to be recorded. It’s not clear if this mode would be on by default.

    While the company is a few months away from shipping the hardware product, it has already released an app — available on the web, Mac and Windows — to record meetings. The app uses system audio and a microphone to record, so there is no need for a bot to join these meetings.

    The app has features we have seen in meeting tools like Otter, Zoom, TimeOS and TLDV. Siroker told TechCrunch that the company aims to differentiate with tools like real-time automated notes and automatically generated meeting briefs based on the participants and previous meetings.

    The app is free and comes with unlimited audio storage and 10 hours per month of AI features like transcription, summary and notes. Unlimited AI features are $29 per month, or $19 per month if paid annually.

    Image Credits: Limitless

    Siroker said one of the major differentiators is the company’s new confidential cloud product that stores data in an encrypted format. While Rewind was largely a local product, the new cloud feature allows users to access data anywhere.

    Siroker said the company had Leviathan Security Group perform a third-party audit on its solution to measure security.

    “Confidential Cloud might sound like an oxymoron, but it isn’t. It is private by design. Unlike the traditional cloud, your employer, us as a software provider and the government cannot decrypt your data without your permission, even if given a subpoena. Only you control the decryption of your data,” he told TechCrunch.

    The way ahead

    On its website, Rewind says it has raised more than $33 million in funding from backers, including a16z, First Round Capital and NEA. The company said it hadn’t used any money from last year’s unusual Series A round — where it called for investors by posting a video on X — so it doesn’t plan to raise any new money.

    The company said it will continue to support Rewind in its current state but will not actively add new features. This means the startup won’t ship the Windows app it had promised to build last year.

    “We don’t have any plans to shut down or merge Rewind into Limitless. We plan to reimplement many of our users’ favorite Rewind features directly into Limitless,” Siroker said.

    “Users can even use both products side-by-side and decide which one they like better. We hope that over time, they will agree with us that the Limitless approach is better and that they will use that exclusively.”

    The company has said that the hardware product will answer questions through an AI-powered bot based on meeting recordings, connections with personal accounts and information on the web. It will also offer a platform for developers to build apps or experiences surrounding the product.

    But Limitless’ larger vision is to build AI agents to do things on your behalf. This seems to be the trend for startups working with AI. Hardware startups like Humane and Rabbit are trying to make devices with AI tools in them that promise to be powerful enough to take care of some tasks for you.

    Browsers like The Browser Company’s Arc and YC-backed SigmaOS are also building agents to browse the web for you. However, there are a lot of unknowns as output by AI bots is still full of errors, and at times, it is hard to make AI understand the context and intentions of your query. AI-powered agents doing some work on behalf of you sure sounds dreamy, but we might have to wait for a while to get there.

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    Ivan Mehta

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