a16z

Stanford Business School Professor Ilya Strebulaev, in collaboration with Blake Jackson, released the 2026 Strebulaev-Jackson Venture Capital Firm Rankings, based on nearly 30 years of data from over 230,000 investments and nearly 13,000 VCs. The research estimates that about 5% of VCs generate approximately 90% of the industry's profits. The top five are Sequoia Capital (10,158 points), Andreessen Horowitz (8,292 points), Accel, DST Global, and Tiger Global. Among them, Parkway Venture Capital (19th place) and Notable (20th place) made it into the top 20, but are not well-known leading brands.The rankings are based on six major factors: discount valuation, dilution adjustment, net profit (after costs), value added (lead investments and board seats), human capital decay (three-and-a-half-year half-life), and credit allocation between institutions and individuals (25% for the investing institution and 75% for the current institution). Of the top 100, 62 are located in California, 19 in New York, and 6 each in Massachusetts and Texas. 21 were established in 2015 or later, and 23 of the best investments are in frontier AI or AI infrastructure companies, with OpenAI listed as the best investment by 4 firms, xAI by 3, and Anthropic and Perplexity by 2 each. The ranking methodology has a correlation of only about 0.27 with the Midas List, with SV Angel investing in about 139 unicorns ranked 31st, and Thrive with only 47 unicorns ranked 8th. This ranking is the result of research by Stanford professors and does not constitute investment advice.

On August 24, a16z's latest chart shows that the weekly active growth of OpenAI Codex in enterprises is extremely polarized. The growth rate for lawyers is as high as 108 times, followed by sales and recruitment at 41 times each, marketing at 26 times, and healthcare at 24 times, while engineers are at the bottom with only 5 times.Codex has evolved from code completion to a digital colleague capable of independently breaking down tasks and running for hours, with lawyers using it to handle vast amounts of long texts and contract comparisons. This marks the "programming" of knowledge work, with the AI explosion shifting from the tech circle to high-value white-collar positions.

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, the wallet related to a16z (0xb5E...c24e) has unstaked and transferred 89,470 HYPE to Wintermute a few minutes ago, worth approximately 6.6 million dollars, possibly for sale.

According to a report by Reuters, American companies have invested a record $517 million in the congressional elections for the House and Senate in 2026 over the 15 months ending in the first quarter of 2026, surpassing the previous high of $461 million during the two-year 2024 election cycle. The cryptocurrency, technology, and online betting industries contributed at least $294 million, becoming a major force in shaping the midterm elections.The Fairshake super PAC, primarily funded by Coinbase, Ripple, and a16z, had $193 million in funding at the beginning of the year and currently has about $130 million remaining; a16z has donated over $81 million to cryptocurrency and AI-related PACs. Elon Musk has invested over $90 million, and Meta has donated $65 million to four super PACs. The AI-related organization Leading the Future has raised $140 million, and Anthropic has donated at least $40 million through dark money non-profit organizations. Online betting companies like DraftKings and FanDuel have donated over $72 million.AdImpact expects total political ad spending for this round of midterm elections to reach a record $11.6 billion. Related industries are making unlimited expenditures through super PACs, affiliated PACs, and dark money non-profit organizations for advertising, voter mobilization, and more, with critics arguing that this amplifies the influence of niche issues such as cryptocurrency regulation, data center energy, and betting regulation.

a16z crypto posted on platform X that monthly spending on crypto payment cards reached approximately $759 million in July this year, an increase of about 2.5 times compared to approximately $306 million a year ago, and a significant rise from less than $1 million in October 2023, with an average transaction amount of about $86.The report states that users can hold stablecoins through custodial or self-custodial methods and spend globally using traditional card networks like Visa, with merchants settling in local fiat currencies. Currently, about 58% of spending is settled in USDC, approximately 26% in USDT, and the share of the euro stablecoin EURe has dropped from about 88% to around 2%.In terms of chain distribution, Optimism, Solana, and Base each account for over 20%, while Gnosis's share has significantly declined.

According to Business Insider, Stripe is in talks to acquire the AI model marketplace startup OpenRouter for over $8 billion.If the deal goes through, the more than 17% stake held by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) will be worth nearly $1.5 billion, while it initially invested about $20 million; Menlo Ventures holds over 6% of the stake, having invested less than $50 million, and its current value has exceeded $500 million. The total return for the two institutions is close to $2 billion.

According to Bloomberg, the U.S. Department of Justice is conducting an antitrust investigation into Silicon Valley's top venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), focusing on its partners serving on the boards of multiple AI companies that are in competition with each other—co-founder Ben Horowitz serves on the board of Databricks, and partner Martin Casado serves on the board of Fivetran, with both companies competing in the data processing field.Casado previously also served on the board of dbt labs (acquired by Fivetran in June). This investigation has been ongoing for nearly a year, starting with the antitrust review of Fivetran's acquisition of dbt labs. Although the acquisition has been unconditionally approved, the investigation into the board positions continues. Such investigations typically end with board members resigning. a16z has close ties to the Trump administration, with both founders donating millions to the Trump campaign in 2024 and successfully pushing for the weakening of safety barriers in AI policy. a16z manages assets totaling $90 billion and recently raised a $15 billion fund, with a portfolio that includes SpaceX, OpenAI, and Cursor, among others.

According to Techtimes, AI model evaluation company Vals AI completed a $40 million Series A funding round with a valuation of $400 million, led by a16z, with participation from 8VC, Pear VC, Bloomberg Beta, as well as new investors HRT Ventures and Next Ladder Ventures.Vals AI uses an independent system to evaluate cutting-edge models launched by companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI, rather than using traditional public benchmark tests. The new funding will be used to expand evaluation infrastructure and launch testing tools for creating programming benchmarks based on enterprise GitHub code repositories.

According to the Financial Times, Erebor Bank, a crypto-friendly bank co-founded by Oculus founder and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, is seeking $1.5 billion in funding, with a pre-money valuation target of $8 billion. This valuation is nearly double the company's valuation of $435 million when it completed a $350 million funding round in December 2025.Currently, Erebor has received support from investment firms such as 8VC and Haun Ventures, and the new funding round is expected to attract participation from institutions like Lux Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Human Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and SV Angel.As investment in AI infrastructure enters a phase of rapid expansion, Erebor is targeting the financing needs of AI companies. AI firms require substantial funds to procure GPUs, build data centers, and secure energy supplies, while traditional financial institutions are gradually exploring financing models for AI infrastructure assets. However, whether Erebor can maintain rapid growth after the cooling of cycles in the AI and crypto industries remains a key focus for the market. This funding round has not yet been finalized and is expected to be completed in the coming weeks.

HappyRobot, an enterprise-level AI intelligence company, announced the completion of a $150 million Series C financing round, led jointly by Prysm Capital and Eurazeo, with continued participation from a16z, Base10, and Y Combinator. Other strategic investors include Koch Disruptive Technologies, Orange, and T.Capital, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.HappyRobot focuses on using AI intelligence to automatically handle complex, multi-step business coordination tasks, reducing the costs of manual coordination. After this round of financing, its total funding amount is approximately $200 million, and the company's valuation has reached $1.2 billion, officially entering the "unicorn" ranks.

According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, two addresses suspected to belong to a16z (0x5a2...208, 0xf55...1C2) transferred 979,000 HYPE to Hyperliquid and staked them 8 hours ago, worth $53.53 million.

According to on-chain analysts, a wallet suspected to be associated with a16z (0xb5E...c24e) has withdrawn a total of 132,056.65 HYPE from various exchanges in the past 8 hours, worth 7.335 million dollars, with an average withdrawal price of 55.54 dollars.Since July 15, the same address has transferred a total of 398,000 HYPE to exchanges, approximately 24.89 million dollars.

According to South Korean media Asiae, six leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital, a16z, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and NEA, announced the signing of a strategic investment cooperation memorandum (MOU) with the National Pension Service (NPS) of Korea, planning to jointly explore investment opportunities, share investment information, and strengthen global venture capital布局.Furthermore, the South Korean government is accelerating the promotion of policies to attract overseas venture capital, coupled with the launch of the "National Growth Fund," which has a scale of 200 trillion won. The market expects that the Korean venture capital sector will see a simultaneous inflow of policy funds, private capital, and overseas capital, with strategic industries such as AI and semiconductors likely to receive more investment. However, industry insiders warn that if a large amount of capital concentrates on a few popular companies, it may inflate company valuations and create bubbles, potentially facing valuation adjustment pressure during future IPOs and mergers and acquisitions, affecting fund returns.

According to Mlm monitoring, a certain HYPE whale staked 2.785 million HYPE through 20 wallets in the past 11 hours, worth approximately 164 million USD.This whale accumulated a total of 2.94 million HYPE from September to October last year, currently valued at about 172 million USD, making it one of the largest holders of HYPE. This whale may be related to a16z, but this has not yet been confirmed.

According to Gelonghui, Atoms, a robotics company founded by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, has completed a $1.7 billion financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with Ben Horowitz joining the board. The equity investors in this round include Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, Chemistry, A*, K5 Global, Abstract, SV Angel, Alpha Square Group, and Uber.Horowitz focused the logic of this investment on specialized robots rather than humanoid robots. He pointed out that in heavy industry, specialized robots are much more suitable for completing most tasks than humanoid robots.