We’re thrilled to announce Anjney will be joining a16z as a general partner to lead our growing AI efforts.
It’s clear we are at the start of a new technology supercycle driven by foundation models and generative AI. But very few people understand the technology, the business implications, who is important in the network, or the underlying trends. In Anjney, we found someone we think has mastered all of them.
In fact, we approached Anjney to join us because it seemed like every time we met an ambitious new AI founder, they had already met with him. And had wonderful things to say about him!
When asked, we repeatedly heard founders say similar things about why they wanted Anj on their team:
He’s built and scaled hard technology to millions of people. We first met Anj in 2018 when he was cofounder and CEO of Ubiquity6, where he and his team were tackling some of the most difficult problems in computer vision and multiplayer infrastructure, eventually selling the business to Discord in 2021. At Discord, Anjney created and ran the company’s first platform ecosystem org for developers, helping turn Midjourney into one of the world’s fastest growing generative AI businesses and spearheading Discord’s recent momentum in generative AI.
He believes early, often when everyone thinks it’s crazy, and commits. When the lead OpenAI engineers behind GPT-3 set out to build their fledgling AI company Anthropic, Anjney was at the top of their call list. At a time when most of the industry was skeptical that AI scaling laws would hold, Anj set about helping founders like them with everything from capital to compute. As a former founder/CEO and angel investor, he has quietly become a trusted consiglieri to leading AI teams, including Eleven Labs, Luma AI, Infinitus AI, Mashgin, and Mobius AI and several unannounced companies at the bleeding edge of this new AI wave.
Like many of us, Anjney is also a deeply technical hacker, who thrives on staying close to the metal and supporting open source. He got his start in machine learning research at Stanford, cutting his teeth on ML as a bioinformatics graduate student before dropping out to join Kleiner Perkins where he founded Edge, the firm’s joint engineering and frontier investing team. Anj still retains close ties to the Stanford CS department, including teaching a course recently on security at scale.
Anj is a technologist, a founder, and has boundless enthusiasm for the potential of AI. Over the last few months, we’ve had many conversations on how AI is going to change the industry and how venture capital needs to adjust to provide the best platform for founders in this new era. Anj’s ideas are dripping with creativity and ambition. So expect a lot to come from him, and from the firm in AI.
