a16z

Multiple venture capital firms in Silicon Valley are competing to secure GPU computing power to provide exclusive resources for their AI startups. a16z established a computing power pool of about 20,000 GPUs as early as 2024 and is negotiating expansion with data center companies Switch and Volta. General Catalyst plans to build a data center for its portfolio companies and has brought in the former head of NVIDIA DGX Cloud in May this year to oversee AI infrastructure operations.Even if AI startups complete their financing, they may not be able to rent GPUs in a timely manner. In April this year, major cloud providers like Microsoft were reported to prioritize allocating computing power to internal teams and large clients, leaving some startups facing months of waiting. a16z previously disclosed that during times of computing power shortages, prices that could originally be secured with a six-month contract might require a three-year commitment. Model training requires a large amount of GPU usage in a short period, while inference demand is difficult to predict, making it easy to waste funds by locking in computing power for several years in advance.a16z is concentrating on purchasing and leasing computing power through the Oxygen project, redistributing it to its portfolio companies, allowing them to access prices and contract terms typically reserved for large clients. In August this year, a16z co-led a $300 million financing round for Volta, which is valued at $2.4 billion, with investments covering both AI startups and data center companies providing computing power. The small venture capital firm Crucible Capital has built a cluster with 576 NVIDIA B300 GPUs for its portfolio companies to test, while also selling some computing power to a cutting-edge AI laboratory. This model allows venture capital firms to take on investments that were previously mainly borne by cloud providers and data center operators.

a16z crypto invited Stanford University professor Dan Boneh, a16z crypto partner Eddy Lazzarin, and other experts to discuss the threats AI poses to cryptography. The experts pointed out that recent advancements in AI in the field of mathematics have not included cryptographic results and have not proven any specific cryptographic assumptions to be less secure.The experts stated that modern cryptography relies on the assumption that certain mathematical problems do not have efficient algorithms; if this assumption holds, no matter how powerful AI becomes, it cannot find algorithms that do not exist. This assumption is related to the unsolved P vs NP problem in computer science, and current AI advancements have not yet touched upon this issue.The experts believe that AI can significantly reduce the time required for cryptographic reviews. Hypotheses that previously took ten years to validate can now allow models to run for a month to attempt to break them. At the same time, the migration work driven by quantum threats has prepared for some of the risks posed by AI, and cryptographic agility can help systems switch methods when weaknesses are discovered. For developers, the most direct opportunity is to use AI to discover more vulnerabilities before software deployment.

Artificial intelligence company TypeSafe AI announced the completion of its Series A financing, amounting to $870 million, with a valuation of $7.5 billion. This round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Sequoia Capital, existing investor DCVC, and a group of angel investors. Andreessen Horowitz partner Martin Casado has joined the board.The company stated that it will convert the funds into benefits for users, continue to refine the developer product Jev, provide more machine-native models, and build the infrastructure needed to create intelligent software. The company claims that one-third of the Fortune 500 companies are using Jev, which has saved customers millions of dollars in production environments, and will further enhance enterprise features requested by users.

Conway Research founder Sigil Wen announced the launch of Underdog, a private personal AI that can run on users' existing devices. Sigil Wen stated that Underdog has received support from a16z, Khosla Ventures, Hummingbird VC, Anthology (Anthropic and Menlo Ventures), as well as individuals and institutions in the AI field such as Patrick Collison, Naval, Guillermo Rauch, Noam Brown, Thomas Wolf, and Logan Kilpatrick.According to the announcement, Underdog's mission is to provide free, accessible, reliable, and private AI to billions of people. The team proposed Underdog's Law: that cutting-edge intelligence will reach users' devices within six months. The project will start with high-speed AI that can run on consumer-grade hardware, advancing capabilities, speed, power consumption, and data efficiency through collaborative design of models and reasoning engines.The announcement also stated that Underdog's research covers agent commerce, confidential reasoning, and how AI can reshape the internet economy, believing that privacy and capability no longer need to be mutually exclusive.

a16z crypto stated that one of the core values of blockchain is "creating entirely new markets." By enabling permissionless issuance and global distribution, it breaks through the long-standing limitations of traditional financial markets, which are constrained by listing committees, legal frameworks, and geographic segmentation, allowing market supply to better match global potential demand.a16z crypto believes that almost all representative markets in the crypto industry benefit from this mechanism, ranging from perpetual contracts, spot DEX, prediction markets to lending, meme coins, NFTs, and the tokenization of real-world assets. Among these, perpetual contracts are the most direct manifestation of this trend. In July of this year, the on-chain RWA perpetual contract trading volume reached an annualized scale of $1.4 trillion, accounting for about half of Hyperliquid's trading volume. With mechanisms like HIP-3 and HIP-4 lowering market issuance thresholds, a16z crypto expects that on-chain markets will continue to expand into commodities, foreign exchange, indices, 24/7 stock exposure, as well as risk assets such as CPI, computing power, music, social trends, and sports, which previously lacked mature financial expressions.

According to Fortune, AI real estate technology company EliseAI announced that it has completed a new round of financing of $350 million, with a valuation of $4 billion. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Bessemer Venture Partners jointly led the investment, with existing investors Sapphire Ventures and Navitas Capital participating.This is the fourth time the company has received investment from a16z and Bessemer since 2023, just about 13 months after its previous round of $250 million Series E financing.It is reported that EliseAI's software currently mainly provides automated rental for homes, tenant services, maintenance requests, and lease renewals, covering about one-sixth of apartments across the United States. This new financing will be used for product development and to expand EliseAI's engineering, deployment, and sales teams in North America.

David George, a general partner at a16z, stated that OpenAI understands a rare but important thing: the purpose of a business is to create customers. He believes that OpenAI will not win solely due to model, chip, cost performance, or product leadership, but because it excels at creating new types of customers and has a more sustainable distribution strategy.David George indicated that in the context where intelligent services are widely available, the key is whether new usage behaviors can be awakened and distribution won. He summarized the leverage for building cutting-edge large-scale AI businesses as creating new behaviors, reaching a large number of users, pricing to capture value, and increasing conversion costs, and he believes that the last two are difficult to form long-term advantages; competition ultimately depends on the first two.The article also mentioned that OpenAI has found seemingly simple breakthroughs in areas such as chat interfaces, reasoning, tool invocation, and Computer Use multiple times, and is building long-term distribution in a platform manner. David George stated that OpenAI has a broad user base covering consumers, professional users, and enterprises, as well as the ability to deeply understand its own technology stack, thus being better positioned to discover reusable new patterns and foundational capabilities.

The venture capital firm a16z crypto stated that the trading of perpetual contracts linked to stocks, gold, and other traditional assets has rapidly increased, with more transactions occurring on-chain. In August 2026, the transaction volume reached $117.3 billion, up 44 times from a year earlier, with open interest at $4.8 billion. After a decline in transaction volume in April 2026, it hit a new high again in May, rising to $145.1 billion in July, before falling back to $117.3 billion in August.Open interest increased from $161 million in July 2025 to $4.8 billion in August 2026, nearly a 30-fold increase, remaining close to record highs even as transaction volumes declined. As of November 2025, centralized exchanges accounted for about two-thirds or more of monthly transaction volumes, with December nearly evenly split with on-chain venues; in August 2026, on-chain venues accounted for 86%, approximately $101 billion, while centralized exchanges accounted for about $16 billion, with their transaction volume declining from a peak in March to July.The decentralized perpetual contract platform Hyperliquid launched HIP-3 in October 2025, allowing developers to deploy their own perpetual contract markets using the shared trading infrastructure HyperCore. That month, the on-chain RWA perpetual transaction volume increased to about $4 billion, with on-chain venues accounting for nearly half of the tracked transaction volume in December. A year ago, commodities accounted for 84%, while in August this year, stocks accounted for 48%, commodities for 28%, and indices for 18%. In June, the open interest for stocks was $1.6 billion, surpassing commodities at $1.2 billion, and in August, they were $2.2 billion and $1.6 billion, respectively.

a16z, in collaboration with the DeFi Education Fund, submitted a joint proposal to SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, proposing the establishment of safe harbor rules and the creation of a "rebuttable presumption," meaning that decentralized exchange (DEX) protocols and their front-end interfaces do not fall under the definition of "exchanges" as defined by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.On the same day, a16z also submitted a second letter urging the SEC to establish a registration system for centralized cryptocurrency trading platforms, similar to the alternative trading system (ATS) rules from 1998. Both letters were dated September 14, and three days later, the SEC issued an "Innovation Exemption" for tokenized stock trading venues.

According to Bloomberg, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) announced the launch of the "Horowitz Andreessen Academy," aimed at recent high school graduates and college dropouts, with the goal of training young talent to develop artificial intelligence products.The program is completely free, providing students with housing, computing resources, and travel funds, positioning itself as an alternative to elite university education.

Recently, discussions surrounding the shutdown of projects invested by a16z have intensified. According to RootData's investment and financing data, after deduplication by project, five institutions—Coinbase Ventures, YZi Labs, Pantera Capital, a16z, and Paradigm—cover a total of 993 independent invested projects, of which 216 are marked as shut down, accounting for a cumulative ratio of 21.75%.Looking at the institutions individually, Pantera has a shutdown rate of 24.76% (51/206), Coinbase Ventures at 22.69% (98/432), a16z at 20.09% (43/214), Paradigm at 19.49% (23/118), and YZi Labs at 13.56% (32/236).Although a16z is at the center of public opinion, it is not the institution with the highest shutdown rate in the sample. Among its 148 lead investment projects, 29 are marked as shut down, accounting for 19.59%, including Linera, which recently announced its closure, and Universal, which has announced its entry into the shutdown process, indicating that even leading institutions cannot eliminate operational risks for projects.

The cross-chain asset protocol Universal has announced its shutdown. The protocol will continue to operate normally for the next 60 days, until November 17, 2026. Universal was launched two years ago to build Universal Assets (uAssets), bringing assets such as SOL, XRP, and DOGE into a new ecosystem, supported 1:1 by underlying assets, and has supported over 80 types of assets.The team stated that the scale has not reached a long-term sustainable level, hence the decision to shut down. According to the tokenized asset data platform RootData, Universal announced last February that it had completed a $9 million financing round, led by a16z Crypto, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and others.

Layer1 public chain Linera team members announced on Discord that their token sale on Sonar received nearly $900,000 in token fundraising commitments, but did not reach the minimum threshold required to complete the sale, and all token sale funds have been refunded to users. The team then attempted to seek emergency financing to maintain project progress towards the mainnet launch but was unable to raise the necessary funds.Currently, the team is gradually shutting down applications and the Discord community. User point balances will be retained, but the team cannot promise any future rights for the points. The team still hopes to complete protocol development and launch applications in the future.According to the tokenized asset platform RootData, Linera has raised a total of $12 million in funding, with investors including a16z Crypto, GSR, Tribe Capital, Flow Traders, Laser Digital, and others.

a16z and DeFi Education Fund (DEF) submitted a proposal to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on September 14, suggesting a "safe harbor" from exchange registration requirements for eligible decentralized exchanges (DEX) and their front-end applications (DEX Apps).The proposal suggests that eligible DEX should possess four characteristics: non-custodial, automated, permissionless, and trustlessly neutral; DEX Apps should maintain non-custodial status, present market data based on objective and verifiable parameters, not exercise discretion over trade execution, and limit developer activities to specific technical functionalities.