Happy hour at #CVPR2026 tomorrow 🍸 Come meet @a16z infra a dozen of the best generative media & computer vision teams in one place. I can promise great food, drinks, and company! RSVP👇

Today we're sharing new breakthrough results for Pearl, our foundation model for protein–ligand cofolding. The OpenBind Consortium recently released the first public structure-affinity benchmark for molecular AI, evaluating six prominent cofolding models on the EV-A71 2A protease. We ran our full Pearl system against the same target. Zero-shot, with no binding-site information and no tuning, the Pearl system reaches 78% on OpenBind's primary success criteria, far ahead of every cofolding model tested by OpenBind. We also assessed a stricter sub-1 Å accuracy threshold, which is more relevant for real-world R&D usage – the Pearl system’s success is still 60%, versus 1–27% for the other models. What matters most to us: this is the same system setup our scientists use on live drug discovery programs, not a benchmark-specific configuration. Thanks to the OpenBind Consortium for building a rigorous public benchmark, and to @NVIDIAHealth for the support on optimizations that enabled model scaling.

Introducing Ideogram 4.0: the best open image model in the world. Think it. Make it. Own it. Download the weights, fine-tune on your own data, and run it on your hardware. Live on every Ideogram plan and the API today.

Going to CVPR in Denver this week? Our team at @a16z and several of our portfolio companies are hosting events! Come hang with us - links 👇

Congrats @BenMildenhall and @_pratul_! ACM gives Grace Hopper Awards to under-35-year-olds for *one specific thing*, here it's NeRF. Past winners include Donald Knuth (for "The Art of Computer Programming"), Steve Wozniak (for Apple), and @martin_casado (for SDN). Good company!

I am thrilled to announce my return to a16z as a full-time General Partner. Having made a full recovery from cancer and navigated some of life’s most taxing personal hurdles, I am returning with a sharpened sense of purpose and a deep optimism for the future, both personally and professionally. My time away reinforced that living to one's fullest capacity requires doing what you love with the people you trust. While I’ve continued to support my boards and founders, I’ve realized my greatest impact happens when I am 'all in.' I believe he current pace of innovation in infrastructure is unmatched, and I couldn't be happier to be back in the trenches with my colleagues and close friends on the a16z Infra team.

Our AI partnership with @Incyte has taken a major step forward and is now one of the most ambitious AI-pharma collaborations. Here's how the partnership is growing: ➡️ $120M upfront consideration ($80M cash $40M equity investment in Genesis), plus recurring research funding, potentially up to several billion dollars in contingent milestone payments, and royalties ➡️ Incyte's proprietary experimental data will help train the next generation of foundation models in GEMS (Genesis Exploration of Molecular Space) ➡️ At least five new collaboration targets, with options for more AI for drug discovery just hit a new milestone. By pairing our AI platform with Incyte’s best-in-class drug development engine and proprietary data, we’re building a flywheel to accelerate the discovery of novel medicines, helping us get new drugs to patients who need them. Full announcement: businesswire.com/news/home/2…