Andreessen Horowitz just announced the firm has only raised a little more than $15 billion in new funding. The transport represented more than 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the United States in 2025, according to the company’s founder Ben Horowitz, but what is more surprising is that it brought the organization to more than $ 90 billion in assets under management, neck and neck with Sequoia Capital as one of the largest venture companies in the world. Which is appropriate, since a16z appears to be very friendly with sovereign wealth funds, including at least one from Saudi Arabia.
The company, which employs approximately hundreds of people in five offices – three in California, plus New York and Washington DC – has become a globe-spanning operation with employees on six continents. In December, they opened their first Asian office in Seoul for their crypto practice.
The newly committed capital is distributed in five funds: $ 6.75 billion for growth investments, $ 1.7 billion each for applications and infrastructure, $ 1.176 billion for “American Dynamism” (more on this), $ 700 million for biotechnology and health, and $ 3 billion for other business strategies. This is the kind of money that makes you wonder where it all is and, more importantly, where it all is.
The question “where does it come from” is one that companies refuse to answer. When we asked a16z this week about its limited partners and its distributed-to-paid-in capital ratio — DPI, or how much actual cash the company has returned to investors over its 16-year history — the company did not respond. What we do know is CalPERS invest $ 400 million in 2023, marking the first time in the history of a16z taking money from the main pension fund of California, probably because the institution with transparency requirements is not really in line with the company’s preference for opacity. We also know that Sanabil Investments, the venture arm of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, list Andreessen Horowitz among portfolio holdings.
The Saudi connection is not subtle. Back in 2023, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz appeared on stage with WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann to discuss their $350 million investment in their new residential real estate venture, Flow. The venue is a conference supported by one of Saudi Arabia’s largest sovereign wealth funds. Horowitz praised Saudi Arabia as a “startup country,” adding that “the Saudis have founders; you don’t call them founders, you called him the great.”
But Marc Andreessen has found another palace to admire. Since President Donald Trump’s election victory in November 2024, Andreessen has logged many hours at Mar-a-Lago, by his own account, helping to shape policy on technology, business, and the economy. Early last year, he became “an unpaid intern“in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, examines candidates for the Trump administration – not only for technology roles but for positions in the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies. Scott Kupor, the first employee of a16z in 2009, was appointed Director of the US Office of Personnel Management last summer.
This is important because a16z’s current strategy is very much in line with what it calls “American Dynamism” – the practice of investing in defense, aerospace, public safety, housing, education, and manufacturing. The portfolio is closely aligned with the priorities of the Department of Defense: Anduril (autonomous defense system), Shield AI (military drone), Saronic Technologies (autonomous naval ship), and Castelion (hypersonic missile). The bigger bet is that America must reindustrialize and reshore critical manufacturing, especially since, as a16z himself notes, the US will exhaust all its missile inventory “in like 8 days” in the conflict with China through Taiwan, then it will take three years to rebuild.
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Then there’s the AI bet, which is perhaps the company’s highest risk, with the highest reward. A16z is embedded at every level of the AI stack: infrastructure (Databricks), foundation model (with stock Mistral AI, OpenAI and xAI), and applications (Characters. AIamong many other portfolio companies).
The company has won to show. A $25 million investment in Coinbase makes it worth $86 billion in its IPO 2021. There’s Airbnb (publicly worth more than $100 billion), Slack (acquired for $27.7 billion), and GitHub ($7.5 billion for Microsoft). One portfolio including 115 unicorns, 35 IPOs, and 241 acquisitions, according to market intelligence firm Tracxn. The company has also made and lost money by taking cryptocurrency tokens, although there is no visibility into the numbers.
In a blog post published on Friday morning, Ben Horowitz wrote that “as America’s leader in Venture Capital, the fate of new technology in the United States rests partly on our shoulders.” It’s a claim that can cause agita in rival companies, some of which have been around for almost 50 years, compared to the younger a16z. Horowitz designed the a16z mission as “making sure America wins the next 100 years of technology.”
What happens remains to be seen. What is certain is that Andreessen Horowitz has mastered the art of raising money – $15 billion this time – to finance his vision of American technological dominance that spans Riyadh, Mar-a-Lago, and the Pentagon. It’s quite a pitch, and clearly, it works.