a16z Launches $400M Seed Fund To Expand Into New Technology
With its new seed fund, the company is expanding its net for opportunities outside of its usual investments.
Marc Andreessen (left) and Ben Horowitz; Source: Bryce Duffy
key takeaways
- “Seed investments have long been at the heart of venture, the true financial bet towards a team, an idea, and little else,” the company said
- “While our core focus in the firm is to continue to back the best software companies, at the seed stage we’re quite happy to stray from our traditional comfort areas to learn alongside the top teams undertaking the most ambitious ideas across any area of tech,” it said.
Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, is launching its new $400 million seed fund, the company said in an announcement Friday.
“Seed investments have long been at the heart of venture, the true financial bet towards a team, an idea, and little else,” the company said.
The company said it views seed funding as a core part of its strategy, after it has written some of the earliest checks into Slack, Okta, Databricks, Samsara, Instagram, and many other companies since it began funding in 2009. Since 2020, a16z has invested about half of its funding into seed stage companies, it said.
The venture capital firm, which manages roughly $18.8 billion in assets, has made a series of early investments in crypto since entering the space back in 2013.
In June, a16z launched a $2.2 billion crypto fund, its third such fund, that will invest in crypto networks and the founders and teams building within the digital assets space. Since then, it has dived into an array of investments within the crypto space from NFT marketplace OpenSea to blockchain-powered 5G networks.
Separately, the company also announced earlier this month it was expanding its operations to the East Coast. With this initiative, the co-founders Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen have continued to search for innovative ways to try to outperform their competitors. One of which is their continued investment offerings in crypto, which includes infrastructure, DAOs, DeFi, NFTs and more, Blockworks previously reported.
But with its new seed fund, the company is expanding its net for opportunities outside of its usual investments. “While our core focus in the firm is to continue to back the best software companies, at the seed stage we’re quite happy to stray from our traditional comfort areas to learn alongside the top teams undertaking the most ambitious ideas across any area of tech,” the company said.
It also plans to partner with seed ecosystems across seed funds, angel investors and operators. “And we are dedicated to offering the best platform to bring companies from seed through IPO,” the company said.
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