All you need to know about Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is one of the largest hedge funds in the crypto market. With investments covering numerous market categories, this name might be considered as the most active. What is Andreessen Horowitz (A16z)? Which well-known projects are included in the fund's portfolio? In the article below, with Market247.io to find out.

What is Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)?

Andreessen Horowitz (or a16z) is an investment fund established in 2009. This is an investment fund operating in Silicon Valley, California and focusing on investing in technology startups.

From the seed round to the Series A, B, C, and D rounds, Andreessen Horowitz invests in the project over time. In 13 years , A16Z has poured billions of dollars into numerous endeavors and various funds.

The team behind a16z includes founders of well-known software businesses. As a result, a16z is aware of the challenges and issues that founders face in the beginning. Since then, the fund has been established with the aim of providing prompt assistance and resolving startup challenges such as knowledge of hiring, legal issues, communication, running, and technical issues in the early phases of development.

Overview portfolio of a16z

A16z has invested in numerous cryptocurrency industry segments during the course of its 13-year existence, including Layer 1, DeFi, NFT/gaming/metaverse, Exchange, and web 3…

Layer 1

Near Protocol: In May 2020, a16z led a round investing $21.6 million in Near Protocol at an unknown valuation.
Avalanche: Avalanche was invested by a16z in Series A with $6 million in funding in 2019, with the participation of many large investment fund names such as Initialized Capital, Polychain Capital or Naval Ravikant.
Solana: a16z and Polychain invested in Solana $314 million, announced in June 2021.
Dfinity: a16z invested in Dfinity very early since the project called for the first rounds. They and Polychain invested twice in this project at valuations of $1.3 billion and $9.5 billion, respectively, in February 2018 and the end of August 2018. a16z and Polychain led two investment rounds worth $61 million and $102 million.
Celo: a16z lead round invested $ 20 million in Celo in February 2021. Before that there were several fundraising rounds of Celo with the participation of Polychain Capital, Reid Hoffman, Jack Dorsey, Coinbase Ventures with the initial amount of about 45 million dollars.
Oasis Network: a16z led a $45 million investment round in Oasis Labs in July 2018. The round also featured multiple funds, including Accel, Binance, Pantera, Polychain, Metastable, Foundation Capital, Electric Capital, DCVC, and Coinbase. The valuation of the project is unknown at the time.

Stablecoin Project

MakerDAO: At a project valuation of $240 million in September 2018, a16z committed $15 million to purchase 6% of the whole supply of MAKER token, the project's governance token. It is currently the most well-liked decentralized stablecoin solution available on the market, and their investment has already returned 1,200% of their initial investment in just three years.
Trust Token: Trust Token is an issuer of stablecoin TUSD, with a centralized stablecoin capitalization of up to $1.2 billion. The project has raised capital many times, including two times with the participation of a16z.
Reflexer: In February 2021, Reflexer Labs announced the completion of a $4 million funding round to develop an ETH-collateralized stablecoin called RAI. The investment round was led by Pantera and Lemniscap, which involved a16z. Currently, the project has 52,641 ETH locked in the protocol.
Fei Protocol: Fei Labs announced in March 2021 that it has raised $19 million from multiple funds including a16z, Framework Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Naval Ravikant. Angle Protocol: Angle Labs raised $5 million in September 2021 from multiple funds, including a16z and others, to build a Derivatives-Backed stablecoin solution.

Exchange

Exchange projects invested by a16z include (including DEX, CEX, Derivatives)

Uniswap: Andreessen Horowitz, USV, Paradigm, Parafi Capital invested in Series A of Uniswap for $11 million, announced in July 2020.
Yellow Card: Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain, invested $1.5 million in this exchange to attack the African crypto market.
CoinSwitch Kuber: In October 2021, a16z and Coinbase Ventures completed a $260 million investment round at a valuation of nearly $2 billion in CoinSwitch Kuber - a CEX exchange focused on the Indian market.

NFT/Gaming/Metaverse

Dapper Labs, the builder of CryptoKittes, raised $11 million in a funding round led by a16z along with other VCs in order to team up with Warner Music to develop a scaling blockchain called Flow. Tens of millions of users are what Flow hopes to achieve in order to give them access to decentralized gaming.
OpenSea raised $100M in a Series B funding round led by a16z to scale the leading NFT marketplace. A16z yearned for OpenSea to become a cross-chain NFT marketplace in crypto.
A16z is one of the investors in the $152 million Series B investment that SkyMavis (the Vietnamese firm that created Axie Infinity) raised. Since the game on Ethereum itself had scaling limitations, SkyMavis will create a sidechain called Ronin to carry on the scaling development.

Lending/Yield

TrustToken: This project I mentioned above, they not only work on TUSD centralized stablecoin but also on TrueFi lending protocol - a lending solution without collateral. The total assets locked in the protocol are currently $1 billion, and the amount borrowed by users is $520 million.
MakerDAO: MakerDAO is actually a debt protocol lending, and I won't repeat it because I've analyzed this project above.
Compound: Compound Finance has two funding rounds attended by a16z with the second round being a $25 million Series A funding round announced in November 2019. Participating in this round of funding are Polychain Capital, Paradigm Capital and Bain Capital Ventures, and the valuation of the projects in these two rounds is unknown.
Goldfinch: $11 million funding round announced in June 2021, led by a16z and attended by Divergence Ventures, Defi Alliance, Jason Choi from Spartan,...

Infrastructure and Data

Arweave: Arweave received $8 million in investments from various funds including a16z, USV, Coinbase Ventures. The investment was announced in March 2020.
Forta: In September 2021, a16z announced it was the first round to invest $23 million in Forta, an enterprise-grade security platform.
Protocol Labs: Labs with many popular infrastructure projects such as IPFS, Filecoin,... It is not clear when and how much a16z invested in Protocol Labs.
Optimism concluded $25M in the Series A funding round led by a16z in Feb 2021. It is an L2 solution on top of the Ethereum blockchain, which is trusted by a16z to compete in the L2 race to be the next destination for Ethereum-based projects.

A16z Team

The a16z team with 42 members operates as a company with a suite of different positions. And general partners might play the most critical role in decision-making progress.

Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen born in 1971, is the co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz based in California, United States. He has 30 years of experience in investing, business, and software engineering.

Marc built Loudcloud, which was bought for $1.6 billion and $4.3 billion, respectively.
Marc and Ben Horowitz invested approximately $80M in over 45 firms over the course of four years, from 2005 to 2009. (Twitter included).
With a $300 million initial investment, Andreessen Horowitz has increased the fund's value nine times to $2.7 billion in just three years by making investments in a variety of tech firms, including Facebook, Github, Pinterest, Twitter, and others.

Ben Horowitz

Ben Horowitz, born in 1966, is a co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which is situated in California. He started out as a software engineer and then collaborated with Marc Andreessen at Loudcloud and Netscape. They then made the decision to establish the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz in their names.

With an initial investment of $300M, Marc and Ben at Andreessen Horowitz grew the portfolio to $2.7B in just three years. Ben Horowitz stated in the beginning of 2022 that a16z had raised $9B from investors who had been following the fund for more than ten years.

Chris Dixon

The general partner of a16z is Chris Dixon. He co-founded SiteAdvisor and Hunch, two tech businesses that were later bought by McAfee and eBay, and invested in them before joining a16z.com. These startups included Pinterest, Stack Overflow, Stripe, and others.

He frequently tweets articles expressing his opinions and investment theses on his personal Twitter account. His Tweetstorms contain some insightful information on the crypto world that may prove helpful.

Evaluation of Andreessen Horowitz's investment strategy

When we look at the a16z portfolio, we can find the following characteristics:

In order to reduce risk, the Andreessen Horowitz investment strategy only invests in projects in Series A, B, and C, as they are the projects with the clearest products.
As is evident, most of a16z's transactions are large, and they frequently take the lead in these transactions. This may be due to the fact that they have a lot of money and must participate in projects with high capital requirements, making them appropriate to invest in later rounds. Leading rounds also indicates that they are more committed and willing to assume more responsibility more project leadership
a16z not only invests in one segment, but invests in almost all segments in the market, including those that have not yet been named. This is also stated in their “investing thesis”, and you can also notice this when you take a look at the fund's portfolio.

Conclusion

invested in by Andreessen Horowitz have enjoyed considerable success over the years, thereby demonstrating the fund's remarkable long-term vision. Above are detailed information, portfolio of a16z - A famous investment fund in the crypto market that you need to know. Market247.io believes that through this article, you have gained useful knowledge. Subscribe to our channel to keep up to date with the latest news from the market.

Learn more about Andreessen Horowitz? FAQs

Why is it called a16z?

The a16z moniker came about when the founders realized the firm's name would be difficult to spell: 16 is the number of characters between the first and last letters of “Andreessen Horowitz.”

How much money has a16z made?

The new a16z fund totals $4.5 billion, split between two "sleeves": $1.5 billion for seed-stage opportunities and $3 billion for more mature efforts.

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