More About Jennifer
Jennifer Li is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she leads infrastructure investments with an eye on data systems, developer tools and AI. She has a soft spot for open source and a hard bias toward products that take gnarly technical problems and turn them into elegant and simple solutions.
She serves on the boards of ElevenLabs, fal, Mintlify, Mux, Pylon, Rasa, Reducto, Stainless and Stacker, and is a board observer at Fivetran, Ideogram, Motherduck, NX and Vantage.
Before a16z, Jennifer led product at Solvvy (acquired by Zoom), building conversational AI for customer experience, and earlier ran self-service and analytics products at AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco for $3.7B). She was a Kleiner Perkins Product Fellow in 2016.
Born and raised in northern China, Jennifer moved to the U.S. for school and never stopped building. She holds an MS in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon and an MS in Technology Management from RPI. When she’s not partnering with founders or mapping tomorrow’s platforms, Jennifer is often found traveling with her family, reading, or tending her garden — usually with a mental sideline on the next platform shift.
Latest Content
-
Web search for the past 30+ years was built for humans. Now it’s being rearchitected for agents.
-
ElevenLabs, an AI voice company based in Europe with teams in London, Warsaw, and San Francisco, exemplifies how geography and culture shape innovation. Its global approach to voice technology bridges research and product development, creative collaboration, and enterprise-scale deployment.
-
a16z leads Reducto’s $75M Series B to reimagine OCR for the AI era. Reducto transforms static documents into live, structured, editable digital objects—turning contracts, forms, and filings into data AI can reason over.
-
Phota Labs raises a $5.6M seed round led by a16z to create generative AI that ensures every photo retains both the likeness of the person and truth of the moment.
-
Autonomous, task-oriented "AI agents" capable of working independently has long been the field’s north star. Yet despite considerable attention and effort, today's agents fall short of this vision.
-
Fal's Burkay Gur and Batuhan Taskaya discuss how they built a generative media cloud optimized for AI video and image models.
-
dbt Labs founder and CEO Tristan Handy discusses the rise (and plateau) of the modern data stack and role of AI in analytics and data engineering.
-
Fal's inference engine is designed for the complexities of multi-modal AI workloads, focusing on performance, cost, and latency.
-
The AI race is on, and 2025 could be its most transformative year yet.
-
Stainless is revolutionizing API development and SDK generation for the AI era, via its unique approach to handling custom code and API best practices.
-
Resend is transforming how businesses communicate with their customers, and setting new standards for the developer experience around email sending.
-
Mintlify lets companies publish quality software documentation that aligns with their brands, including guides, API reference, and examples.
-
MotherDuck CEO Jordan Tigani discusses DuckDB's spiking popularity as the era of big data wanes, as well as the nexus of SQL and LLMs.
-
Pylon provides a single view of customer issues, wherever they are happening — Slack, Teams, chat widget, ticket forms, or emails.
-
Anyscale's Robert Nishihara discusses the challenges of training and running AI models at scale, and how a focus on video data will change generative AI.
-
In this AI + a16z podcast episode, Mohammad Norouzi shares his story of building influential text-to-image models at Google and cofounding Ideogram.
-
Mature code-generation technology, coupled with advanced generative AI image models, has shortened the journey from idea to fully operational application.
-
The release of the latest Ideogram.ai model is a massive step forward for image models. We're excited to lead their Series A.
-
Upstash powers caching and messaging for tens of thousands of production applications across four different products, including many AI applications.
-
A very simple “getting started with AI” template for those who want to play with core technologies, but not have to think too much about tooling.
-
ElevenLabs is on a mission to give every program a voice through its proprietary speech synthesis, voice design, and cloning technology
-
Composable customer data platforms are taking advantage of a shift in data infrastructure and embracing a “warehouse-first” architecture.
-
Big data’s roots are in the hyperscalers. As a result, most tooling we use for analytics today has been built around a scale-out approach where performance is sacrificed for the ability to handle enormous amounts of data...
-
Design partners, or the first few users of a company's software, are often a key part of the early software development process.
-
The Data50 are the 50 bellwether data startups across the most exciting categories in data, such as AI/ML, ELT and orchestration, and data observability.
-
It’s no secret that the Cambrian explosion of SaaS applications is already leading to a massive shift in how companies reach and engage with customers. As students of this evolution, we’ve watched the decade-long Death o...
-
Building software has gotten insanely cheaper and faster. The infrastructure provided by the cloud or IaaS vendors has evened the technical ground for builders. A flourish of no-code tools have shortened the prototyping...
-
One of the biggest trends emerging in the enterprise space over the last five years is the concept of “no-code” -- a programming mechanism that uses a visual development interface to enable non-technical users to build a...
-
Over the last decade, the move to cloud has undoubtedly accelerated technological innovation for companies large and small. This move has translated to over $100B of cloud spend in 2021 alone. The dynamic of ballooning s...
-
As more and more B2B companies become product-led, how quickly and precisely a company identifies new customer needs and ships product ultimately determines its success. To develop product ideas faster and get shorter ti...
-
These frameworks help map the user journey to figure out the right product tiers, how to differentiate them, and how to price them.
-
As an industry, we’ve gotten exceptionally good at building large, complex software systems. We’re now starting to see the rise of massive, complex systems built around data – where the primary business value of the syst...
-
To help data teams stay on top of the changes happening in the industry, this article reviews an updated set of data infrastructure architectures.
-
Peter Levine tracks the rise of open source software and provides a practical, end-to-end framework for turning an open source project into a successful business.