Andreessen Horowitz just announced the firm has just raised a little more than $15 billion in new funding. The haul represents over 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the United States in 2025, according to firm co-founder Ben Horowitz, but even more jaw-dropping is that it brings the organization to more than $90 billion in assets under management, putting it neck-and-neck with Sequoia Capital as among the largest venture firms in the world. Which is fitting, since a16z appears to be very friendly with actual sovereign wealth funds, including at least one from Saudi Arabia.
The firm, which employs approximately hundreds of people across five offices – three in California, plus New York and Washington D.C. – has become a globe-spanning operation with employees on six continents. In December, it opened its first Asia office in Seoul for its crypto practice.
That newly committed capital breaks down across five funds: $6.75 billion for growth investments, $1.7 billion each for apps and infrastructure, $1.176 billion for “American Dynamism” (more on that shortly), $700 million for biotech and healthcare, and another $3 billion for other venture strategies. It’s the kind of money that makes you wonder where it all comes from and, more importantly, where it all goes.
The “where it comes from” question is one the firm has historically declined to answer. When we asked a16z this week about its limited partners and its distributed-to-paid-in capital ratio – the DPI, or how much actual cash the firm has returned to investors over its 16-year history – the firm didn’t respond. What we do know is that CalPERS invested $400 million in 2023, marking the first time in a16z’s history it took money from a major California pension fund, probably because institutions with transparency requirements don’t really align with the firm’s preference for opacity. We also know that Sanabil Investments, the venture arm of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, lists Andreessen Horowitz among its portfolio holdings.
The Saudi connection isn’t subtle. Back in 2023, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz appeared onstage with WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann to discuss their $350 million investment in his then-new residential real estate venture, Flow. The venue was a conference backed by one of Saudi Arabia’s largest sovereign funds. Horowitz praised Saudi Arabia as a “startup country,” adding that “Saudi has a founder; you don’t call him a founder, you call him his royal highness.”
But Marc Andreessen has found another royal to admire. Since President Donald Trump’s November 2024 election victory, Andreessen has logged a lot of hours at Mar-a-Lago, by his own account, helping shape policy on tech, business, and economics. Early last year, he became an “unpaid intern” at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, vetting candidates for the Trump administration – not just for tech roles but for positions in the Defense Department and intelligence agencies. Scott Kupor, a16z’s first employee back in 2009, was sworn in as Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management this past summer.
This matters because a16z’s current strategy is heavily weighted toward what it calls “American Dynamism” – a practice that invests in defense, aerospace, public safety, housing, education, and manufacturing. The portfolio aligns remarkably well with Defense Department priorities: Anduril (autonomous defense systems), Shield AI (military drones), Saronic Technologies (autonomous naval vessels), and Castelion (hypersonic missiles). The bigger bet is that America needs to reindustrialize and reshore critical manufacturing, particularly since, as a16z itself notes, the U.S. would exhaust its entire missile inventory “in something like 8 days” in a conflict with China over Taiwan, then need three years to rebuild it.
Then there’s the AI bet, which might be the firm’s highest-risk, highest-reward play yet. A16z has positioned itself across every level of the AI stack: infrastructure (Databricks), foundation models (with stakes in Mistral AI, OpenAI and xAI), and applications (Character.AI, among many other portfolio companies).
The firm has wins to point to. Its $25 million investment in Coinbase turned into an $86 billion valuation at the 2021 IPO. There’s Airbnb (public at over $100 billion), Slack (acquired for $27.7 billion), and GitHub ($7.5 billion to Microsoft). Its portfolio includes 115 unicorns, 35 IPOs, and 241 acquisitions, according to the market intelligence firm Tracxn. The firm has also made and lost money by snapping up cryptocurrency tokens, though there’s less visibility into those numbers.
In a blog post published Friday morning, Ben Horowitz writes that “as the American leader in Venture Capital, the fate of new technology in the United States rests partly on our shoulders.” It’s the kind of statement certain to cause agita at rival firms, some of which have been around closer to 50 years, compared with the much younger a16z. Horowitz frames a16z’s mission as “ensuring that America wins the next 100 years of technology.”
Whether that happens remains to be seen. What’s certain is that Andreessen Horowitz has mastered the art of raising money – $15 billion this time — to fund a vision of American technological dominance that runs through Riyadh, Mar-a-Lago, and the Pentagon. That’s quite a pitch, and plainly, it works.
