a16z Drops Crypto From Its Name, Widens Bets to AI and Frontier Tech

Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm better known as a16z, is renaming its crypto fund “a16z Frontier” and widening its mandate to AI and other emerging technologies, according to an email shared with its newsletter subscribers on Thursday.

a16z is among the biggest backers of the crypto industry, and when a firm that size drops “crypto” from its name, it shows where it may expect the next wave of cash to go. Chris Dixon, a general partner who runs the crypto team, says the firm’s bets include Coinbase, the blockchain network Solana, and Uniswap, a platform where people swap tokens without a middleman.

a16z calls the move “an expansion” and says crypto stays: “we will continue to invest in crypto and related ventures and advocate for sensible crypto regulation,” the firm wrote.

The argument is that blockchains—shared digital ledgers that record who owns what without a bank in the middle—have faded into the background of products people already use.

“Wall Street and fintech companies now regularly launch products built on blockchains. Does that make them crypto companies? The label matters less now,” Dixon wrote, adding that it makes more sense to define companies “by what they do rather than by the technologies they use.”

In January, a16z said it had raised more than $15 billion across its funds, and co-founder Ben Horowitz wrote in a firm post that the mission “starts with winning the key architectures of the future—AI and crypto.”

Dixon expects more “native use cases,” which he defines as “brand-new activities you couldn’t do before,” since AI so far has mostly made existing work like coding “faster, better, and cheaper.” Early versions, he says, “will look strange and unserious, like toys and hobbies,” before some grow into mainstream products.

The new label covers startups “building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop,” a bet Dixon says goes back more than a decade.

“When I joined a16z in 2013, I made these kinds of long-horizon investments a focus,” Dixon wrote. “The growth of smartphones made cameras, sensors, and chips better and cheaper, enabling new devices like drones, AR/VR headsets, and wearables. That theme led to investments in Oculus and drone startups like Skydio and Zipline.”

The next wave, he says, includes “autonomous machines that can perceive, reason, and act in the physical world” as well as advances in biology and medicine.

He also envisions a post-AGI society referring to artificial general intelligence, a still-theoretical AI that can match or beat humans at nearly all thinking tasks.

Crypto stays in the picture because Dixon sees it giving AI agents, meaning programs that act on their own, a way to pay each other. “Crypto can give new networks native economic capabilities, enable machine-to-machine transactions, and create new ways to bootstrap them,” he wrote.

Dixon made a similar argument in 2022, when crypto’s total market value had fallen about two-thirds from its 2021 peak. “What I look at is not prices,” he said then, pointing to developer and entrepreneur activity as the core metric.

Dixon will lead the new fund alongside a16z founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and general partners Eddy Lazzarin and Guy Wuollet. His post gives no size for the renamed fund, so the latest figure on record is the $2.2 billion announced in May.