Global AI retention benchmarks are shifting as foundational cohorts emerge and frontier models gain traction. Insights from OpenRouter's State of AI report reveal how workload-model fit drives long-term adoption across markets.

A global analysis of AI usage, reasoning models, and agentic workflows powered by data and insights developed with OpenRouter’s 100 trillion token ecosystem.

AI is reshaping local tech scenes by strengthening SF’s pull and enabling solo founders to build independently, shifting how talent concentrates and startups emerge.

Enterprise sales are evolving fast. Startups are now adapting their GTM playbooks for the AI era: faster pilots, proof-driven demos, and higher trust standards.

AI’s “bitter lesson” demonstrates that scaling compute now drives progress, enabling small teams to turn financial and computational resources into powerful systems.

In AI, energy policy is not a peripheral concern; the challenge of “speed-to-power"—how fast a new data center can access energy—is key to competing. To ensure a level playing field, we need an AI energy policy agenda that works for startups.

AI is breathing new life into old marketplace ideas, transforming once-failed models into opportunities through automation, smarter matching, and new value propositions.

Web search for the past 30+ years was built for humans. Now it’s being rearchitected for agents.

PowerPoint trained generations to think in bullet points, while Gamma uses AI to unlock clearer reasoning, smarter storytelling, and higher-agency work. Its prompt-based interface transforms presentations from linear slides into tools for real understanding and better decisions.

If you want to beat experts as an outsider, turns out you can just read 25 books.

From Silicon Valley to the global tech stage, a16z New Media empowers startup founders with brand strategy, storytelling expertise, and media distribution to grow influence and build generational companies.

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.

If you live in the United States today, and you accidentally knock a hole in your wall, it’s probably cheaper to buy a flatscreen TV and stick it in front of the hole, compared to hiring a handyman to fix your drywall. This seems insane; why? Well, weird things happen to economies when you have huge bursts of productivity that are concentrated in one industry.

Fifteen years ago, if you asked “what are smart people doing on weekends?” a really good answer would’ve been “making YouTube videos.”

Learn how to scale a company, codify culture, and build repeatable go-to-market systems from Raghu Raghuram, a16z’s newest general partner, managing partner, and former CEO of VMware.

Most great organizations start as pirates — breaking rules, defying empires, and building fortunes from the wreckage. “Move fast and break things” captured that spirit: better to be bold and decisive than slow and perfec...

Reactionary anti-tech sentiment is a real and important force in the world, and possibly an underdiscussed topic. Not in the sense that it should get more airtime (it shouldn’t); but in the sense that it’s interesting. P...

Last year, it seemed like every week a new frontier video model would one-up its peers and push our expectations. We learned to simply expect relentless improvement on measurable benchmarks: longer video output, sustaine...

Some news... I’ve joined a16z!

This piece was originally published in The Free Press.

When we think about professionals buying software - from individual developers up through huge enterprises - it’s often not enough for the product to be good and useful. You have to convince your prospective users of you...

Everyone *says* they’re building a platform company, but the proof is in the P&L.

AI-native startups are transforming enterprise software by targeting greenfield companies at formation, winning distribution before incumbents, and redefining business infrastructure across global markets as labor becomes software.

Prediction is emerging as the defining framework beyond postmodernism — reshaping business models, technology adoption, and cultural trends. Explore how AI, prediction markets, and speculation are driving this shift, and why a16z is investing in Kalshi to back the future of predictive platforms.

Prediction path screenshots are becoming the internet’s newest meme, turning shifting odds into viral stories across sports, politics, and pop culture. With a16z backing Kalshi, prediction markets are entering the mainstream as social, shareable moments that reshape how people bet, post, and participate online.

Generative AI is revolutionizing software development, with AI coding assistants and agentic tools transforming how 30 million developers plan, code, review, and deploy software worldwide. From productivity gains worth trillions in global GDP to a fast-evolving startup ecosystem, the AI coding revolution is reshaping the future of programming and software creation.

As AI infrastructure providers like OpenAI and Anthropic move up the stack to launch consumer products, startups can build defensible positions by owning exclusive, high-quality data. Companies such as VLex and OpenEvidence show how proprietary, regulated, and dynamic datasets can create durable moats—and where the next “walled gardens” of data may emerge across sectors from law and medicine to climate and culture.

Raghu Raghuram joins a16z as Managing Partner and a General Partner

Explore how startups allocate AI spending across models, infrastructure, creative tools, and vertical applications. See the top 50 AI-native companies driving the next wave of productivity and reshaping the future of work.

The strongest companies build belief through vivid, human-centered storytelling that conveys real details and lived experiences. By embracing contradictions and showing what’s truly at stake, they create narratives that inspire trust and lasting impact.

China has rapidly surpassed global competitors in robotics, building a complete supply chain and innovation ecosystem that positions it as the emerging superpower in physical AI. Without urgent regulatory reform and allied industrial coordination, the United States risks losing its ability to compete in the defining technological and strategic race of the century.

Legal AI is transforming law firms and in-house teams, with impact driven by tools that align with business models, build trust, and automate workflows.

I’ve always believed that “opportunities live between fields of expertise.” That idea has been both an investment philosophy and a metaphor for my career. The most valuable insights often come from combining skills, kno...

Pentagon procurement has devolved into Soviet-style central planning—stifling innovation and production—and calls for bold reforms like commercial-first acquisition, portfolio buying, and startup-friendly contracting to restore speed, scale, and industrial strength.

AI-powered productivity tools are emerging as both generalist platforms and specialized applications. We benchmarked over a dozen to see how they perform across core tasks like email, spreadsheets, presentation, research and meeting notes.

AI companies don't necessarily have worse retention that their SaaS counterparts. New benchmarks for measuring AI retention.

AI has ushered in a wave of new consumer products that are growing faster than ever before. Companies are going from zero to millions of users and surpassing $100M ARR in less than two years – a growth trajectory unheard...

Security tools are best understood not by acronyms but by where they disrupt the cyber kill chain, which maps defenses directly to attacker behavior. What look like competitors often address different stages of attack, leaving meaningful room for founders to build differentiated platforms.

The AI opportunity is bigger than anyone modeled. How exponential cost drops and new business models are creating better companies than we've ever seen.

Policymakers say they love entrepreneurs. But if you look at recent years of legislation, regulation, and public discourse, you'd think entrepreneurs were the enemy. Not only do some policymakers not prioritize helping entrepreneurs, our government has created a system that impedes the very people who take risks, invent new tools, create jobs, and build the next generation of American companies.

Apply now for the a16z speedrun Winter/Spring 2026 cohort. Applications close September 28, 2025, at 11:59 PM PT.

Why private markets are the new engine of growth in tech investing.

The dormant Commerce Clause isn’t an obstacle to all state AI regulation, but a guidepost for effective AI governance. States should regulate harmful in-state uses of AI, like fraud or discrimination, where regulation can actually protect residents while supporting innovation and American competitiveness.

In the early days of the energy industry, fortunes made in two different way: oil wells and pipelines. AI founders now face the same choice. Go deep into a single workflow or build a pipeline that moves data and automations.

Recruiting is a founder’s most underestimated challenge, and success comes from mastering sourcing, process, and closing.

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.

When software was expensive and hard to build, we mostly made it for serious things and expected it to last (like payroll systems, tax tools, ERP software and consumer networks). Every line of code had to justify itself.

The electro-industrial stack is turning hardware into software driven systems and powering a new industrial era.

In the era of foundation models, multimodal AI, LLMs, and ever-larger datasets, access to raw compute is still one of the biggest bottlenecks for researchers, founders, developers, and engineers. While the cloud offers scalability, building a personal AI Workstation delivers complete control over your environment, latency reduction, custom configurations and setups, and the privacy of running all workloads locally.

Why common criticisms about AI app margins misses the mark.

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.

With AI, we built something close to a digital god. Then we crammed it into a web app and typed at it. Shouldn’t we be able to interact with it in more meaningful ways?

This summer, we twice witnessed military history unfold. Ukraine first stunned the world with Operation Spider's Web, crippling Russia’s strategic nuclear bomber fleet deep within its territory by using commercial drones...

I’m joining a16z!

Is Google Screwed? Maybe. But Not How You Think.

Large institutional investors can anchor a generational rearmament of the American industrial and innovation base.

Why certain companies outperform consensus expectations in each platform shift, and how to tell if you're on track to build one.

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

The world of AI app generation isn’t winner-take-all. There's space in this massive market for multiple breakout companies, each carving out its own niche.

Too many businesses wait too long to flip the fee switch — so here’s how to reason about when to turn on fees in a network.

Fal's Burkay Gur and Batuhan Taskaya discuss how they built a generative media cloud optimized for AI video and image models.

“Many banks have hostages, not customers.” Reviving the fight over data access, new M&A deals, and more in our July Fintech newsletter.

Socket founder and CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh dives into the intersection of vibe coding and security — a great pairing if you follow some best practices.

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

Metronome CEO Scott Woody unpacks how AI is fundamentally changing the value proposition of SaaS, spurring a shift to usage-based pricing.

Narrow apps are hiding inside broader platforms. The free tier is the funnel. The $200 tier is the real product.

Delaware’s no longer a safe bet. a16z is moving to Nevada—and here’s why more founders should reconsider where they incorporate.

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

Labelbox CEO Manu Sharma explores data labeling and evaluation in AI, from early supervised learning to today’s reinforcement learning loops.

The third batch of a16z Open Source AI Grants focuses on better understanding the capabilities of frontier LLMs and testing their boundaries.

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.

Business leaders and technologists increasingly feel compelled to enter public service. Studying earlier eras will help us understand how to make it work.

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.

In this episode, Tennr cofounder and CEO Trey Holterman sits down with a16z’s David Haber and Jay Rughani to unpack one of healthcare’s most overlooked pain points: patient referral logistics. When a patient is referred...

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

Arcjet's David Mytton and a16z's Joel de la Garza discuss how sites can distinguish malicious bots from helpful AI agents — and what to do about it.

The assumptions underpinning traditional penetration testing are starting to bend, and a new generation of AI-driven approaches is emerging.