Enterprise

Deepfakes—AI-generated fake videos and voices—have become a widespread concern across politics, social media, and more. As they become easier to create, the threat grows. But so do the tools to detect them.

Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson are pioneers in AI. While the world has only recently witnessed a surge in consumer AI, our guests have long been laying the groundwork for innovations that are transforming industries today...

Ambience cofounder Nikhil Buduma discusses how to build vertical applications with AI models, including in health care, and why tech expertise isn't enough.

In this episode, we cover the recent data breach of nearly 3B records, including a significant number of social security numbers. Joining us to discuss are security experts Joel de la Garza and Naftali Harris. Incredibly...

PromptFoo creator Ian Webster discusses the importance of red-teaming for AI safety and security, and of bringing those capabilities to more organizations.

Command Zero CTO Dean de Beer discusses how large language models can help with cybersecurity incident response, and how to build products on LLMs.

Is it time to hand over cybersecurity to machines amidst the exponential rise in cyber threats and breaches?

In this AI + a16z podcast episode, Mohammad Norouzi shares his story of building influential text-to-image models at Google and cofounding Ideogram.

In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, a16z partners Guido Appenzeller and Matt Bornstein discuss the state of the generative AI market, about 18 months after it really kicked into high gear with the release of ChatGP...

Security-startup founders Dean De Beer (Command Zero), Kevin Tian (Doppel), and Travis McPeak (Resourcely) share their thoughts on generative AI.

In this AI + a16z episode, a16z's Zane Lackey and Joel de la Garza discuss how generative AI and LLMs could effect profound change in cybersecurity.

In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Socket's Feross Aboukhadijeh and a16z's Joel de la Garza discuss the open-source software supply chain.

Pinecone Founder and CEO Edo Liberty discusses the promises, challenges, and opportunities for vector databases and retrieval augmented generation (RAG).

The AI + a16z podcast captures our thinking on artificial intelligence across a broad swath of areas, from infrastructure to business implications.

Naveen Rao of Databricks joins a16z's Matt Bornstein and Derrick Harris to discuss where we're at in terms of large language model (LLM) adoption.

This episode of the AI + a16z podcast features a panel discussion from back in February, focused on the state — and future — of open source AI models.

The AI Revolution is here. In this episode, you’ll learn what the most important themes that some of the world’s most prominent AI builders – from OpenAI, Anthropic, CharacterAI, Roblox, and more – are paying attention to. You’ll hear discussion around the real-world impact of this revolution, on industries ranging from gaming to design, and the considerations around alignment along the way.

The AI Revolution is here. In this episode, you’ll learn what the most important themes that some of the world’s most prominent AI builders – from OpenAI, Anthropic, CharacterAI, Roblox, and more – are paying attention to. You’ll hear about the economics of AI, broad vs specialized models, the importance of UX, and whether we can expect scaling laws to continue.

Today’s episode is all about crypto security — that is, the new mindsets and the new strategies for storing crypto assets safely while also allowing holders control and access. (As a reminder, none of the following should be taken as investment advice, please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information.) We’ve covered security trends more broadly a ton in our content, which you can find at a16z.com/security, as well as crypto-related trends including NFTs, and the creator and ownership economies. But as more people enter crypto lately — thanks to the boom in NFTs, decentralized finance, and much more — we share specific best practices and options for securing crypto as well as discussing how it all fits this next evolution of the internet: web3. Our expert today is a16z crypto data scientist Eddy Lazzarin, who joins host Zoran Basich. He covers practical approaches ranging from passwords to crypto wallets and what users can do; the evolution of crypto briefly; and the big picture mindset shifts involved here as well.

In today’s episode we have two short segments, both on bioscience topics.

How ransomware works, from the anatomy of a hack to how the groups operate; the role of nation-states, insurers, and regulators; and what to do if your stuff is taken hostage...

When you hear stories about Amazon's famous "invention machine", we often hear about things like: Memos, six pages exactly and no powerpoints at al! Or, the idea of "work backwards from the press release". But what's lost is the how, as well as the broader narrative of how all companies and leaders, not just Amazon and Bezos, can define their ways as they scale. After all, Amazon was once a small startup, too. So in this episode -- the very first podcast for the new book Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon -- the authors share firsthand observations and experiences from being in "the room" where it happens, from AWS, Kindle, and Prime to more importantly, the leadership principles, decision making practices, and operational processes that got Amazon there. Can other startups do the same?

In this special “3x”-long episode of our (otherwise shortform) news analysis show 16 Minutes, we cover the SolarWinds hack, one of the largest known hacks of all time... and the ripple effects are only now starting to be revealed, especially given latest news reports from the U.S. government. What actually happened, when does the timeline really begin? We help cut through the headline fatigue of it in this "anatomy of a hack" teardown -- the who, what, where, when, how -- from the chess moves to the step by step long game.

The rise of developers -- as buyers, as influencers, as a creative class -- is a direct result of "software eating the world", since every company is a tech company (whether they know it or not). Developers are therefore the key to solving business problems and to thriving not just surviving, argues Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, in his new book, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century. Lawson shares hard-earned lessons learned, mindsets, and tactics -- from "build vs. buy" to "build vs. die", to the art and science ("mitosis") of small teams -- for leaders and companies of all sizes and kinds.

We're back to covering multiple items on our show 16 Minutes -- which covers the news, occasional explainers, and teases apart what's hype/ what's real -- as well as where we are on the long arc of innovation.

In this episode of our show 16 Minutes -- where we talk about the headlines, and where we are on the long arc of tech trends -- we cover the news around Google DeepMind's AlphaFold system for predicting the 3-D structure of proteins outperforming 100 teams across 20 countries in the 14th Community Wide Assessment on the CASP (Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction) challenge. The challenge, which takes place every other year (over several months) tracks progress, key metrics, and state-of-the-art on predictive techniques for protein folding.

As companies evolve -- especially from product to sales to scaling operations -- so must the leaders. But can the same person transition across all these phases? When and when not; what are the qualities, criteria, and tradeoffs to be made? Two enterprise startup CTOs share a glimpse into their journeys on the question of to CEO or not to CEO; managing their psychology and tactics for managing transitions; and much more.

Lakes v. warehouses, analytics v. AI/ML, SQL v. everything else... As the technical capabilities of data lakes and data warehouses converge, are the separate tools and teams that run AI/ML and analytics converging as well?

The story of textiles IS the story, history, and evolution of technology and science (across all kinds of fields, from biology to chemistry); of commerce (as well as management, measurement, machines); but most of all, of civilization (vs. just culture) itself. That's what Virginia Postrel's new book, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World is all about. But it is in fact a story of innovation, of human ingenuity... which is also the theme of the a16z Podcast.

Just having data is not enough: it takes an entire system of tools and technology to extract value from data. a hallway style conversation between Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Founder of Databricks, and a16z general partner Martin Casado explore the evolution of data architectures.

We know community is important -- whether for developer relations for your platform or just other types of communities -- but how do we measure the success of community initiatives and even artifacts (like events or schwag)? How do we know we're even measuring the right things? And when it comes to developer relations specifically, where should devrel sit in an organization (product, sales, engineering)? Who should you hire first? And how do you reconcile developer as customer vs. developer as community member?

AI/ML development is like reining in the natural world, more like physics and even metaphysics, where data and models are fluid. But this not just a philosophical observation; it has real implications for the margins, organizational structures, and building of such businesses. Especially as we’re in a tricky time of transition, where customers don’t even know what they’re asking for, yet are looking for AI/ML help or know it’s the future. So what does this all mean for the software value chain; for open source collaboration and commodification; for a new type of AI/ML company; and for the future of software businesses?

WHEN are we going to have a COVID-19 vaccine, and how the heck are we going from 12 years of vaccine development compressed into 12 months or so? What will and won’t be compromised here, and where do new technologies (like mRNA) come in? Where will vaccines likely be distributed first; who will and won't get them initially; how do we maintain not just safety and efficacy of vaccines but trust and transparency when it comes to mis/information? We may actually see the emergence of a "Neo Anti-Vaxxer"... but we may also be entering a renaissance for vaccinology after this pandemic.

In this episode, we continue our community series with a recent discussion that applies to many kinds of community building. Today’s topic: How do you create a platform that people not only use, but tell their friends about? One that goes beyond just being useful and actually connects deeply with the user? In this discussion, which was recorded at our Crypto Startup School in April 2020, a16z General Partner Chris Dixon talked about building communities — specifically, communities of open-source developers — with GitHub cofounder Tom Preston-Werner. They discussed how to engage early users, how to turn them into your biggest advocates, how to create superfans, and more. Today, GitHub is the leading community for open-source developers and others. They also discuss in-person communities vs. distributed communities, a topic that is very top of mind today.

Communities are everything, but the word "members" is faceless. What if there's a better, more modern way to understand, support, and design for communities of all kinds -- whether open source, passion economy, or other groups coming together? Nadia Eghbal offers the latest research and insights from her new book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software... but it's not all participatory, and it's not all public, either.

In this special "2x" explainer episode of 16 Minutes -- where we talk about what's in the news, and where we are on the long arc of various tech trends -- we cover all the buzz around GPT-3, the pre-trained machine learning model that's optimized to do a variety of natural-language processing tasks. The paper about GPT-3 was released in late May, but OpenAI (the AI "research and deployment" company behind it) only recently released private access to its API or application programming interface, which includes some of the technical achievements behind GPT-3 as well as other models.

Many don’t realize we even need to think about the possibility of security hacks when it comes to things like pacemakers, insulin pumps, and more. But when bits and bytes meet flesh and blood, security becomes literally a life or death concern. So what are the issues and risks we need to be aware of in exposing security vulnerabilities in connected biomedical devices?

More than 98% of the information on the web is lost within 20 years, and huge gaps exist in our digital and cultural history. Zoran Basich and Alex Pruden of a16z talk to Brewster Kahle and Sam Williams, who are using different approaches to attack this problem. Brewster cofounded the Internet Archive, which is well known for creating the Wayback Machine that crawls a billion URLs every day. Sam cofounded Arweave, a company that uses decentralized crypto networks to store information forever. For both of them, this issue has implications that go far beyond just data storage. It touches on issues of censorship, government manipulation of information, and how historical context is necessary for well-functioning societies. They discuss how decentralized models offer the promise of building a next-generation web that works better for users.

Gross margins are one of the most important financial metrics for any startup, but figuring out what does and doesn't go into them as a company grows is not as simple as it sounds. In this episode, we discuss why and when margins matter, and how they evolve along the way.

In this special "2x" episode (#32) of our news show 16 Minutes -- where we quickly cover the headlines and tech trends, offering analysis, frameworks, explainers, and more -- we cover the tricky but important topic of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The 1996 law has been in the headlines a lot recently, in the context of Twitter, the president's tweets, and an executive order put out by the White House just this week on quote- "preventing online censorship". All of this is playing out against the broader, more profound cultural context and events around the death of George Floyd in Minnesota and beyond, and ongoing old-new debates around content moderation on social media.

In this week's episode of 16 Minutes on the News with Joel de la Garza, in conversation with Sonal Chokshi, we discuss the security and privacy concerns around Apple and Google’s approach, called "privacy-safe contact tracing". Yet technology is not the biggest part of this discussion; it’s also about rights, cultures, and values... and the bigger questions around what happens when people are "transformed into cellphone signals".

Going from rapid warning to early detection through social network sensors can make all the difference when it comes to contagion/ the spread of disease and pandemics. Can we get public health bio surveillance without sacrificing privacy and agency?

As the responsibility of CSOs has expanded, the role has moved from technical IT to the boardroom. How do the best CSOs prepare for and respond to a crisis, from redteaming to comms? What responsibility should cloud & SaaS vendors, not to mention the government, have in security and data breaches?

Today’s episode is one of our intimate hallway-style conversations — or as intimate as remote work allows anyway. It’s all about the history and future of protocol development.

Zoom has not only experienced unprecedented, rapid growth (from 10M to 200M daily active users) due to the coronavirus pandemic and shelter-in-place -- but is also seeing a shift in use cases from primarily enterprise to more consumer as well. At the same time, there have been several security issues and concerns around Zoom, including "zoombombing" porn; home-grown encryption; and key-management systems, servers, and engineers in China. What's hype/what's real in the headlines here? In this episode of 16 Minutes, a16z general partner David Ulevitch (former SVP/GM at Cisco), and operating partner for security Joel de la Garza (former CSO of Box) break it all down in 16+ minutes with Sonal Chokshi. What does it all mean for related tech trends in bottom-up SaaS -- from user onboarding and the flip side of "earning the right to be complicated" to pricing & packaging -- as well as for open source; and cloud security, particularly when it comes to video?

We are in the midst of a rapid and unprecedented shift to remote work. What does it mean for security when the airgap between work and life is gone? How prepared are organizations? And what should security professionals...

This episode of our news show teases apart what was just a concept, what's near from the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2020). Board partner Steven Sinofsky (in conversation with Sonal Chokshi) takes us on a quick tour of the based on his annual field trip report from the floor.

In this podcast, a16z operating partner Frank Chen interviews Stuart Russell, Founder of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at UC Berkeley. They outline the conceptual breakthroughs, like natural language understanding, still required for AGI. But more importantly, they explain how and why we should design AI systems to ensure that we can control AI, and eventually AGI, when it’s smarter than we are. The conversation starts by explaining what Hollywood's Skynet gets wrong and ends with why AI is better as "the perfect Butler, than the genie in the lamp."

News and trends covered this week include: * Star Wars trailer in Fortnite, gaming, and future of social -- with @tocelot * Congress warns tech companies to take action on encryption, or else "we will impose our will on you" -- with @martin_casado @joeldelagarza

This is the 14th episode of 16 Minutes, our weekly-ish news show where we quickly cover the top headlines of the week, the a16z Podcast way: what’s real, what’s hype from our vantage point in tech. This week, we cover the following news -- with a16z experts general partner Julie Yoo and market dev partner Venkat Mocherla from the bio team, and former CSO/ a16z security operating partner Joel de la Garza.

This is the 13th episode of 16 Minutes, our weekly-ish news show where we quickly cover the top headlines of the week, the a16z Podcast way: what’s real, what’s hype from our vantage point in tech. This week, we cover the following news -- with a16z experts general partner Connie Chan and D'arcy Coolican from the consumer team, and former CSO/ a16z security operating partner Joel de la Garza.

The government wants to get onto the cloud! But how do they assess the levels of risk in adopting specific cloud products, and which "cloud service providers" (aka "CSPs") to work with? That's where FedRAMP -- the Federa...

This is episode #6 of our new show, 16 Minutes, where we quickly cover recent headlines of the week, the a16z way -- why they're in the news; why they matter from our vantage point in tech -- and share our experts' views on these trends as well.

Synthetic fraud—yes, it's a thing: a new evolution of consumer fraud that’s been emerging in financial services, to the tune of $1-$2B a year. In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Naftali Harris, co-founder and CEO of Se...

Deep learning has arrived in the life sciences: every week, it seems, a new published study comes out... with code on top. In this episode, a16z General Partner Vijay Pande and Bharath Ramsundar talk about how AI/ML is u...

Recorded as part of our NYC roadtrip, this episode features Cornell Tech PhD student and software engineer Phil Daian, who researches applied cryptography and smart contracts -- and who also wrote about "On-chain Vote Buying and the Rise of Dark DAOs" in 2018 (with Tyler Kell, Ian Miers, and his advisor Ari Juels). Daian is joined by a16z crypto partner Ali Yahya (previously a software engineer and machine learning researcher at GoogleX and Google Brain), who also recently presented on crypto as the evolution -- and future -- of trust.

One of the toughest challenges for founders — and especially technical founders who are used to focusing so much on product features over sales — is striking “product-market fit”. The concept can be defined many ways, but the simple definition shared in this episode is: it’s when you understand the business value of your product.

The idea of the cybercriminal as lone wolf or hobby hacker is no longer much of a reality. Instead, the business of cybercrime looks a lot more just like that -- a large, global technology business, with many of the asso...

The problem of "dark data" in healthcare isn't just a feel-good empowerment thing, but a structural issue that leads to miscommunication and extra friction, different players in the entire healthcare system not being abl...

There’s all sorts of interesting tech trends happening right now, including AI, VR/AR, self-driving cars and drones (as well as interesting stuff happening in verticals like healthcare and finance) — and there’s a lot also happening in seemingly more “mature” tech revolutions, such as mobile and cloud. But where are we now, really, with these shifts… and how does that inform how we think about the next couple decades?

What happens when the bottoms up, organic growth usually associated with consumer companies starts to go…. enterprise? Part of our continuing podcast series (you can listen to part one on user acquisition and part two on engagement/retention) on growth, this episode explores the increasing trend of enterprise growth shifting to be more “bottoms up” — with a16z general partners Martin Casado and Andrew Chen, and DocSend CEO and co-founder Russ Heddleston, in conversation with Hanne Tidnam.

The open source movement enabled so much in computing, including the collaborative building of libraries -- that is, building blocks of code that developers could combine together to build applications. But as these appl...

Cryptonetworks are often compared to firms, people, or even coral reefs -- but, observes a16z crypto partner Ali Yahya, they might be much more similar to cities. Where does that analogy fit, and where does it break down...

“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcomes.”

There's a lot of knowledge out there -- and networks of talent (especially in Silicon Valley) -- on what to do in the early stages of a company, going from 0 to 1, and even in going from 1 to 100... but what about beyond...

The rise of zero-sum thinking -- which has come snapping back recently -- slows and even halts progress, observes Marc Andreessen. Because you're then dividing up a smaller piece, adds Ben Horowitz, instead of growing the pie altogether. This is true not just in economics, politics, and tech, but also in business relationships (and life), too.

There are over 20 million programmers out there -- and double that, if you count everyone else coding in other ways -- but where are the next 100 million developers? How do we get to a billion developers? The answer, obs...

Here's the hard thing about security: the more authentication factors you have, the more secure things are... but in practice, people won't use too many factors, because they want ease of use. There's clearly a tension b...

We now live in a world where connecting the dots between intel and modeling threats has become infinitely more complex: not only is the surface area to protect larger than ever, but the entry points and issues are more d...

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is the organization responsible for the compilation and release of the first the Panama Papers, a series of 11.5 million documents that detailed the offshore deal...

Given concern around data breaches, the EU Parliament finally passed GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) after four years of preparation and debate; it goes into enforcement on May 25, 2018. Though it originated in...

APIs (application programming interfaces), observe the guests in this episode of the a16z Podcast, can be described as everything from Lego building blocks to Tetris to front doors to even veins in the human body. Becaus...

What happens when monolithic architectures are broken down into containers and microservices (or when things are broken down into smaller units, not just in infrastructure but perhaps even in company structure too)? From...

Given the heated discussions around security and the c-word (“cyber”), it’s hard to figure out what the actual state of the industry is. And clearly it's not just an academic exercise -- it is a matter of both business s...

In 2017 The Economist declared data to be the world's most valuable resource. And yet “data insight” is one of those phrases that, while important, is now so ubiquitous it’s been numbed of meaning. So how do you actually...

The internet, believe it or not, was just the beginning. Yes, it spawned an incredible number of uses (some unexpected), from marketplaces and commerce to publishing and social networks... but that’s all been built with...

Data, data, everywhere, nor any drop to drink. Or so would say Coleridge, if he were a big company CEO trying to use A.I. today -- because even when you have a ton of data, there's not always enough signal to get anythin...

When you have "a really hot, frothy space" like AI, even the most basic questions -- like what is it good for, how do you make sure your data is in shape, and so on -- aren't answered. This is just as true for the compan...

There are many reasons why we’re in an “AI spring” after multiple “AI winters” — but how then do we tease apart what’s real vs. what’s hype when it comes to the (legitimate!) excitement about artificial intelligence and machine learning? Especially when it comes to the latest results of computers beating games, which not only captures our imaginations but has always played a critical role in advancing machine intelligence (whether it’s AI winning Texas Hold’em poker or beating the world human champ in the ancient Chinese game of Go). Deal and research operating team head Frank Chen and a16z board partner Steven Sinofsky ponder all this and more, in conversation with Sonal Chokshi, in this episode of the a16z Podcast. We ended last time with the triumph of data over algorithms and begin this time with the triumph of algorithms over data … is this the end of big data?

We've already talked quite a bit about the Algorithms, Machines, and People lab at U.C. Berkeley (AMPLab) -- all about making sense of big data -- so what happens when the entire world moves towards artificial intelligen...

We've already talked about why bitcoin matters. But as the set of cryptocurrencies -- and networks and "tokens" enabled by the underlying blockchain -- grow (Ethereum being one of the fastest-growing ones), where do we g...

The story of how innovation happens is a long one -- from government funding early basic research, to the heyday of corporate R&D like Bell Labs, to startups as experiments before product-market fit. Through all that...

Beyond the overly simplistic framing of trade as “good” or “bad” — by politicians, by Econ 101 — why is the topic of trade (or rather, economies and people adjusting to trade) so damn hard? A big part of it has to do with not seeing the human side of trade, let alone the big picture across time and place… as is true for many tech innovations, too.

"Young hungry and scrappy" is how Hamilton described his country, and it's how many -- including the guests on this episode -- describe startups... or more precisely, the mindset that engineers in startups need to balanc...

"When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, shit happens." It's true of people, it's true of companies, and it's even more true of countries. It's also the fundamental insight captured by ancient Greek his...

What happens when companies grow exponentially in a short amount of time -- to their organization, their product planning, their behavior towards change itself? In this hallway conversation, a16z partners Steven Sinofsky...

A funny thing happened on the way to quantum computing: Unlike other major shifts in classic computing before it, it begins -- not ends -- with The Cloud. That's because quantum computers today are more like "physics exp...

"We're always fighting the last war" -- that's a phrase historians like to use because policymakers and others tend to be so focused on the threats they already know, and our mindsets and organizational structures are or...

When individuals gain the abilities that only nation states once had, how do we put cyber threats in perspective for policymakers -- without unduly "inflating" the threats? As it is, security is an intense and important...

Nearly every cybersecurity discussion/presentation follows this formula: We don't know what we're doing; the bad guys are getting smarter; our defenses are getting worse; everything's more connected than ever; we're head...

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.

Which AI apps are people actively using? What’s actually making money, beyond being popular? We analyzed the data.

Internal software development is undergoing a quiet revolution. Generative AI is transforming the equation, collapsing the gap between idea and execution. Here’s how we got here, and why the next era of internal tooling is arriving sooner than expected.

Historically in vertical SaaS, companies were founded by domain experts who hired technical teams to build software for problems they had experienced firsthand. What we’re seeing now is the reverse. AI-native companies are largely led by technical founders, people who deeply understand large language models and what they can do. They’re not insiders to the industries they’re building in; they’re experts in the toolset.

Permissioned data access appears to be under siege. If data access becomes a closed-loop system, what breaks — and what is lost?

Rillet is building the AI-native enterprise resource planning (ERP) system — a self-driving finance system designed from the ground up for speed, intelligence, and automation.

An AI-first workflow automation platform for lenders. The company builds AI agents to handle borrower interactions across voice, text, email, and chat.

Plus: Inside our investments in Thinking Machines Lab, Cluely, and more in our latest Enterprise newsletter.

Insights from finance leaders at Databricks, ElevenLabs, Together AI, Concourse, and Ambient.ai, in our June Fintech newsletter.

Much of what worked for traditional SaaS companies doesn’t hold true for AI. Here's how enterprise AI startups are adapting, growing, and breaking out.

The AI-powered assistant operates discreetly on users' desktops, intelligently interpreting live audio and on-screen context to deliver proactive insights.

Analysts can become key sources of product feedback, shape buyer perception, and underscore your credibility in key deals. Our guide to making that happen.

16 key shifts in how enterprises are budgeting for, buying, and deploying gen AI in 2025—and beyond.

New revenue benchmarks for gen AI startups in year one, based on dozens of enterprise and consumer AI companies we’ve spent significant time with.

Toma is a fully integrated, AI-powered software suite designed to help dealerships operate more efficiently.

Enterprises buying AI are like your grandma getting an iPhone: they want to use it, but they need you to set it up.

Market research has long relied on expensive human surveys. Now AI research companies are replacing them with simulated societies of generative AI agents.

Plus: A framework for defining and refining your ICP, emerging developer patterns, and more in the May Enterprise newsletter.

In the not-so-distant future, consumers and businesses will be able to instruct an agent to make any payments they want on their behalf.

Traditional search was built on links; GEO is built on language. A new paradigm is emerging, one driven not by page rank, but by AI models.

Younger founders often lack the deep networks important for distribution and earned insights around high-value problems that older founders have. AI changes that.

We unpacked the unconventional tactics in Deel's playbook to help guide the business strategy and culture of other startups.

Which AI apps are people actively using? What’s actually making money, beyond being popular? We analyzed the data.

Camber is a company that is simplifying the healthcare reimbursement process for healthcare providers so they can focus on delivering quality care to their patients. 

No company loves their enterprise resource planning system (ERP). So why are ERPs the way they are, and why is now the right time for them to change?

The business process outsourcing (BPO) market is massive, and we believe there is a clear opportunity with AI to productize and unbundle the BPO.

What products are builders using to make websites and web apps with AI? A deep dive into how these products work, their limitations, and the features on the horizon. 

DeepSeek, China’s AI breakthrough, has exposed the U.S.'s policy failures. And not a day too soon.

Voice is one of the most powerful unlocks for AI application companies. As models improve, AI voice will become the wedge, not the product.

Eve is the AI-native case workspace that acts as an intelligent partner for plaintiff attorneys, helping them take on 3-4x the number of cases that they were previously able to handle.

In the December 2024 Enterprise Newsletter, we discuss how AI is now driving the beginning of yet another and possibly more dramatic pricing shift.

An external "AI brain." Big swings in biopharma. Infinite games. A nuclear resurgence. "Faceless" creators. Google search challengers. Battlefield AI. We asked 50 a16z partners to preview one big idea that will spur innovation in 2025.

AI voice assistants for the freight industry. Customers are using Happyrobot for both inbound and outbound calls, including load updates, check calls, and carrier sales negotiations. 

In this post, we will look at how AI will open new markets previously deemed too “small” to support a large vertical SaaS company.

As AI turns labor into software, the opportunity to productize external professional services has become a hot topic. However, we believe there is also substantial opportunity in productizing internal work within organizations.

Brian Roberts is joining Andreessen Horowitz as a General Partner, where he will work across the American Dynamism and AI Apps funds.

Andy McCall is joining Andreessen Horowitz as a General Partner. He will work across the American Dynamism and AI Apps funds.

Pantheon is an AI-enabled architectural firm that can provide the same high-quality deliverables that you'd expect from a traditional firm.

LLMs can now enable experiences that capture data at the point of creation in ways that were impossible for traditional software.

Every day, millions of SMBs waste countless hours synthesizing waves of unstructured information and entering data into systems of record. We call this the “messy inbox problem.”

Braintrust is a devtool platform for any product effort — from simple apps to sophisticated products — based around large language models.

In this post, we look at how AI is increasing VSaaS revenue per customer by enabling vertical SaaS companies to take on tasks previously too complex for software.

Every white-collar role will have an AI copilot. Some of these roles will be fully automated with AI agents. 

Pylon provides a single view of customer issues, wherever they are happening — Slack, Teams, chat widget, ticket forms, or emails.

Cursor is a fork of VS Code that’s heavily customized for AI-assisted programming, with loads of features designed to integrate AI into developer workflows.

Today, thanks to AI, we are witnessing potentially the greatest transmutation in history. Software becomes labor. It’s the new E=MC2.

We crunched the data to find out: Which gen AI apps are people actually using? And which are they returning to, versus dabbling and dropping?

With LLMs and AI-enabled data infrastructure, common sales activities will be redefined and completely new seller workflows will emerge.

Generative AI is working its way into everything, and firms want to show they are implementing this new tech — especially those that serve the accounting market.

Senate Bill 1047 is designed to apply to models trained above certain compute and cost thresholds. It also holds developers legally liable for the downstream use or modification of their models.

a16z is excited to invest in Decagon, an AI agent that automates customer support for a business, and to have led their seed round.

We see three phases in the evolution of adopting GenAI in marketing: the development of marketing copilots, the introduction of marketing agents & the rise of an autonomous marketing team.

AI can own B2B workflows by converting them into a feature or capability within the product. This is the potential that we believe SynthAI yields.

The stakes are high. The opportunities are profound. From the creation of new medicines to bolstering national defense, this is our vision for the AI-enabled future.

Mature code-generation technology, coupled with advanced generative AI image models, has shortened the journey from idea to fully operational application.

We are pleased to welcome Erin Price-Wright as our newest American Dynamism partner.

a16z's Zane Lackey and Joel de la Garza discuss the state of security in 2024 and a top CISO concern: the impact of GenAI on enterprise security.

Tennr understands unstructured inputs, applying AI reasoning and decision-making to perform complex end-to-end workflows.

The release of the latest Ideogram.ai model is a massive step forward for image models. We're excited to lead their Series A.

Tigris has built a globally available S3-compatible distributed object-storage service that makes the application developer’s job as simple as possible.

Upstash powers caching and messaging for tens of thousands of production applications across four different products, including many AI applications.

Doppel is building a next-generation approach for detecting and removing fraudulent accounts and phishing attacks across various channels.

Luma AI is building multimodal intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world.

Distributional is building a platform for robust and repeatable testing of AI and machine learning models so teams can push to prod confidently.

a16z announces its second batch of a16z Open Source AI Grant recipients. This cohort focuses mainly on LLMs and visual AI models.

Mistral is at the center of the open source AI developer community. This is the most promising path to achieve robust and trusted AI systems.

Smart energy grids. Voice-first companion apps. Programmable medicines. AI tools for kids.
We asked over 40 partners across a16z to preview one big idea they believe will drive innovation in the coming year.

No one knows how generative AI will play out from a product perspective. The speakers at our Connect/Enterprise event shared their thoughts and experiences.

The speakers at our Connect/Enterprise event share their experiences across a range of company-building topics, from product strategy to COVID-19.

Insights from leaders at OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Databricks, Character.AI, Roblox, insitro, and Figma on where we are, where we're going, and the open questions for building the next wave of AI.

Generative AI is likely going to usher in a far more profound method of company transformation.

a16z announces its Open Source AI Grant program, which will support a small group of open source developers through grant funding.

With generative AI, we’re already seeing use cases with orders-of-magnitude improvement in time, cost, and performance over previous AI waves.

Many digital-first companies have been propelled by generative AI. However, selling these digital products globally is not a straightforward undertaking. Here's how to simplify the cross-border selling experience, get in front of the right customers, and build long-term value.

A reference architecture for the LLM app stack. It shows the most common systems, tools, and design patterns used by AI startups and tech companies.

A curated list of resources we’ve relied on to get smarter about modern AI, including generative AI, LLMs, and transformer models.

Those who complain about hallucinations miss the point. A dispersion of outputs (including hallucinations) will unlock a whole new category of product design: probabilistic products.

At this early stage in generative AI, technologists and product pickers will likely have the biggest impact on which companies emerge as winners. 

Founders and execs from Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Gong, and Yubico share their experiences and advice on growing enterprise startups.

Our 2023 report aims to break through the noise of price movements to track the signals that matter and the progress of web3 technology.

When computers were first built, each new application had to be programmed specifically for each chip. This was very complicated for developers and, as a result, the companies that created operating systems to simplify t...

We’ve watched large language models (LLMs) become mainstream over the past few years and have studied the implementations in the context of B2B applications. Despite some enormous technological advances and the presence...

We're starting to see the very early stages of a tech stack emerge in generative artificial intelligence (AI). Hundreds of new startups are rushing into the market to develop foundation models, build AI-native apps, and...

From entertainment franchise games to the precision delivery of medicines, small modular reactors to loads of AI applications, here are 40+ builder-worthy pursuits for 2023.

Why AI models will replace artists long before they'll replace programmers