What We Believe_
AI represents a generational shift in computing — following in the footsteps of the microprocessor and the internet — and it will deliver commensurate improvements in cost, efficiency, and human productivity.
At a16z Infra, we believe that infrastructure underpins this coming shift just as it does for many other transformational technologies. That’s why we invest in founders and companies building at every level of the stack: from foundation models, core AI systems, and developer tools, to next-gen cloud, data, and security systems.
Featured Content_
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Building Developers Tools, From Docker to Diffusion Models
Replicate CEO Ben Firshman and a16z partner Matt Bornstein discuss the art of building productss — from PaaS to AI — that appeal to software developers.
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Welcome to LLMflation – LLM inference cost is going down fast ⬇️
For LLM of equivalent performance, the inference cost is decreasing by 10x every year. What cost $60/million tokens in 2021 costs $.06/million tokens today.
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The Best Way to Achieve AGI Is to Invent It
Pedro Domingos joins Martin Casado to discuss the state of AI, whether we're really on a path toward AGI, and the value of expressing unpopular opinions.
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Neural Nets and Nobel Prizes: AI’s 40-Year Journey from the Lab to Ubiquity
a16z General Partner Anjney Midha discusses the Nobel Prizes awarded to AI researchers, and how work dating back decades led to today's AI-powered world.
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Tesla’s Road Ahead: The Bitter Lesson in Robotics
What does Rich Sutton’s "Bitter Lesson" reveal about the decisions Tesla is making in its pursuit of autonomy?
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How GPU Access Helps Startups Be Agile
Oxygen is an a16z program that helps AI startup founders navigate their compute challenges and access the GPUs and other resources they require.
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Investing in Braintrust
Braintrust is a devtool platform for any product effort — from simple apps to sophisticated products — based around large language models.
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DisTrO and the Quest for Community-Trained AI Models
Bowen Peng and Jeffrey Quesnelle of Nous Research discuss their mission to accelerate open source AI research, including with a new project called DisTrO.
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The Frontier of Spatial Intelligence with Fei-Fei Li
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...
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Balancing AI Expertise and Industry Acumen in Vertical Applications
Ambience cofounder Nikhil Buduma discusses how to build vertical applications with AI models, including in health care, and why tech expertise isn't enough.
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What’s In a World? Investing in World Labs
Fei-Fei Li and are team of experts at World Labs are building a spatial intelligence model that can generate 3D worlds that users can interact with.
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Investing in Mintlify
Mintlify lets companies publish quality software documentation that aligns with their brands, including guides, API reference, and examples.
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AI, SQL, and the End of Big Data
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.
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Investing in Pylon
Pylon provides a single view of customer issues, wherever they are happening — Slack, Teams, chat widget, ticket forms, or emails.
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Investing in Cursor
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.
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The Researcher to Founder Journey, and the Power of Open Models
Black Forest Labs founders Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser discuss their new company building state-of-the-art image and video models.
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Why Computer Science Subsumed Biotech
Vijay Pande walks us through two decades of applying software engineering and AI to biotech and health care — from Folding@Home through AlphaFold and more.
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Democratizing Generative AI Red Teams
PromptFoo creator Ian Webster discusses the importance of red-teaming for AI safety and security, and of bringing those capabilities to more organizations.
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Investing in Black Forest Labs
We're excited to announce our investment in Black Forest Labs (BFL), which is building the world’s best open visual models for developers.
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Keep the Code Behind AI Open
Martin Casado and Ion Stoica argue that open-source models will power innovation without compromising security.
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Augmenting Incident Response with LLMs
Command Zero CTO Dean de Beer discusses how large language models can help with cybersecurity incident response, and how to build products on LLMs.
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Scaling AI for the Coming Data Deluge
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.
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Beyond Language: Inside a Hundred-Trillion-Token Video Model
Jiaming Song and Anjney Midha discuss Luma's Dream Machine 3D model that shows abilities to reason about the world across a variety of aspects.
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Developer Tool UX in the Age of Generative AI
Alasdair Monk discusses how generative AI is changing how developers — and the those building for developers — interact with the tools of their trade.
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What You Need to Know About SB 1047: A Q&A with Anjney Midha
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.
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Building Production Workflows for AI Applications
In this AI + a16z episode, Inngest CEO Tony Holdstock-Brown discusses the reality of running AI agents and multistep AI workflows in production.
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The Future of Image Models Is Multimodal
In this AI + a16z podcast episode, Mohammad Norouzi shares his story of building influential text-to-image models at Google and cofounding Ideogram.
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Open Models (w/ Arthur Mensch) and Video Models (w/ Stefano Ermon)
We stitched together two episodes from the a16z Podcast, featuring Anjney Midha interviewing Arthur Mensch (Mistral) and Stefano Ermon (Stanford).
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Open Models and Maturation: Assessing the Generative AI Market
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...
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AI + a16z
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.
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AI Talks Leave ‘Little Tech’ Out
Regulators influenced by the big companies create barriers to entry for "little tech" and curtail innovation.
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Security Founders Talk Shop About Generative AI
Security-startup founders Dean De Beer (Command Zero), Kevin Tian (Doppel), and Travis McPeak (Resourcely) share their thoughts on generative AI.
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How Generative AI Is Remaking UI/UX Design
Mature code-generation technology, coupled with advanced generative AI image models, has shortened the journey from idea to fully operational application.
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How Discord Became a Developer Platform
In 2009 Discord cofounder and CEO, Jason Citron, started building tools and infrastructure for games. Fast forward to today and the platform has over 200 million monthly active users. In this episode, Jason, alongside a1...
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How to Think About Foundation Models for Cybersecurity
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.
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Securing the Black Box: OpenAI, Anthropic, and GDM Discuss
Human nature fears the unknown, and with the rapid progress of AI, concerns naturally arise. Uncanny robocalls, data breaches, and misinformation floods are among the worries. But what about security in the era of large...
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Securing the Software Supply Chain with LLMs
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.
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Vector Databases and the Power of RAG
Pinecone Founder and CEO Edo Liberty discusses the promises, challenges, and opportunities for vector databases and retrieval augmented generation (RAG).
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Remaking the UI for AI
Anjney Midha shares his thoughts on how hardware for AI might evolve over the years to come as we place more emphasis on AI inference workloads.
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Jennifer Li
Jennifer Li is being promoted to General Partner at a16z. She will continue to invest broadly within the enterprise space, focusing on infra.
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Scoping the Enterprise LLM Market
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.
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Making the Most of Open Source AI
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.
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The Future of AI Is Amazing
a16z's Martin Casado lays out the case for AI as a driving force behind incredible advancements in tech, creativity, and the human experience.
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Announcing Our Latest Open Source AI Grants
a16z announces its second batch of a16z Open Source AI Grant recipients. This cohort focuses mainly on LLMs and visual AI models.
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Safety in Numbers: Keeping AI Open
Arthur Mensch is the co-founder of Mistral and the co-author of Deepmind’s pivotal 2022 "Chinchilla" paper. In September 2023, Mistral released Mistral-7B, an advanced open-source language model that has rapidly become the top choice for developers. Just this week, they introduced a new mixture of experts model – Mixtral — that’s already generating significant buzz among AI developers. As the battleground around large language models heats up, join us for a conversation with Arthur as he sits down with a16z General Partner Anjney Midha. Together, they delve into the misconceptions and opportunities around open source; the current performance reality of open and closed models; and the compute, data, and algorithmic innovations required to efficiently scale LLMs.
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Connect/Enterprise: Building Products With Generative AI
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.
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The Economic Case for Generative AI
To date, a handful of large companies have captured the value created by advances in AI. With generative AI, that’s changing.
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Where We Go From Here
As CTO of OpenAI, Mira Murati oversaw the development and release of GPT-4 and ChatGPT. Here she tells Martin Casado the story behind the release of ChatGPT—and what it tells us about the future of AI and human-machine interactions.
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Supporting the Open Source AI Community
a16z announces its Open Source AI Grant program, which will support a small group of open source developers through grant funding.
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The Economic Case for Generative AI and Foundation Models
With generative AI, we’re already seeing use cases with orders-of-magnitude improvement in time, cost, and performance over previous AI waves.
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The Getting Started with AI Stack for JavaScript
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.
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Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications
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.
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AI Canon
A curated list of resources we’ve relied on to get smarter about modern AI, including generative AI, LLMs, and transformer models.
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The Rise of the Composable CDP
Composable customer data platforms are taking advantage of a shift in data infrastructure and embracing a “warehouse-first” architecture.
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5 Founders on the Future of Data
Highlights from the a16z Data and AI Forum, featuring founders building products across the spectrum of data and AI use cases.
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Navigating the High Cost of AI Compute
The generative AI boom is compute-bound and, as a result, a predominant factor driving the industry is simply the cost of training and inference.
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Who Owns the Generative AI Platform?
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...
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Market Annealing: Getting to $10M ARR in Very Early Markets
Understanding how to build a company in the face of a new, immature, or non-existent market is a topic startups should obsess about.
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Art Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Machine-Generated
Why AI models will replace artists long before they'll replace programmers
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The Cloud Killed Infrastructure, Long Live Infrastructure!
Vertical clouds are on the rise, as traditional clouds give way to specialization.
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The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox
The pressure the cloud puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits you scale and growth slows. Understand how much market cap is being suppressed by the cloud to help inform the decision-making framework on managing infrastructure as companies scale.
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Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure
To help data teams stay on top of the changes happening in the industry, this article reviews an updated set of data infrastructure architectures.
AI + a16z
The stakes are high. The opportunities are profound. Explore our vision for the AI-enabled future.
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Meet the Infra Team_
We’re former founders leveraging our know-how to invest in entrepreneurs building at every level of the AI stack: from foundation models, core AI systems, and developer tools, to next-gen cloud, data, and security systems.
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Infra Portfolio_
Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described on this page are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. Exits include current and former a16z portfolio companies which have been acquired as well as companies which have undergone an initial public offering or direct public offering of shares. Certain publicly traded companies on this list may still be held in Andreessen Horowitz funds. A list of investments made by funds managed by a16z is available here: https://a16z.com/investment-list/. Excluded from this list are investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets. Further, the list of investments is updated monthly and as such may not reflect most recent a16z investments. Past results of Andreessen Horowitz’s investments, pooled investment vehicles, or investment strategies are not necessarily indicative of future results.