It’s so great to be back at a16z on the AI Infra team – there could not be a more exciting time to be in this space! As we continue to grow, I’m looking for someone to partner with me on the front lines of company evaluation and investing through AI research, market mapping, modeling and diligence.

"From the outset, a16z has been organized as a firm, not a fund whose purpose is to help founders build amazing businesses, and to do it as much as possible. We have been uncompromising on this tradeoff since day one. Today there is an added mission and a call to help not just founders, but America and her allies. We’re answering that call." - @bhorowitz

I can’t think of better people other than @RaghuRaghuram @AnneNeuberger @jkhamehl @astrange and @GEVS94 to lead this global effort. This firm has never seized to pursue the bigger ambition, and building leverage for our founders. 🌎

Excited to be part of the team tackling our global efforts and to help spearhead our international investing alongside my partner @astrange! We believe AI is the great equalizer. For the first time, billions of people can access PhD-level intelligence from a phone. Talent is more distributed than ever, and Silicon Valley is ultimately a state of mind. We’re already seeing this shift play out. Great global companies are being born outside the U.S. and scaling faster than ever: ElevenLabs, Black Forest Labs, Mistral, Lovable, Decart, Manus, Sakana, Wonderful, and many others are just the beginning. Our goal is simple: build a bridge between the United States and the world’s best founders, operators, and technologists — and partner with them to win globally. We’ll also continue doubling down on immigrant founders in the U.S. through our Borderless network. Immigrants have founded or co-founded 59% of America’s privately held billion-dollar startups, including companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, Databricks, Stripe, Ramp, Safe Superintelligence, Anysphere, Vercel, and RunwayML. The next generation of category-defining companies will be born anywhere and scale everywhere, and we want to be the partner of choice for the founders building them. Read More on Ben Horowitz Blog Post: a16z.com/a16zs-global-missio…

Today a16z is officially going global! @GEVS94 and I started a16z’s Borderless Founder network 5 years ago with a simple premise: many of the best founders in the world will come from outside the U.S. And one of the most powerful things we can do is to help accelerate their global networks - bridges into the U.S., and deeper connectivity in their home markets. The data backs this strategy up: - Immigrants have founded or cofounded 59% of America’s privately held billion-dollar startups, including companies like SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, Stripe, Ramp, Safe Superintelligence, and Anysphere. - One in four U.S. billion-dollar companies has a founder who first came to America as an international student. Today we are announcing and bringing together our global initiatives. The next generation of category defining companies could be born anywhere but will scale everywhere. Proud to be part of this team! Read more in @bhorowitz blog below 👇

We’re thrilled to lead Town’s $55M Series A. Town is a personal AI assistant that works across the tools you already use - email, calendar, Slack, docs, WhatsApp, desktop, web. It learns how you work and starts proactively pitching in. People are already leaning on Town for the kind of work that’s personal and operationally messy: running recruiting pipelines, juggling school logistics, processing handwritten grant requests, prepping summaries, drafting follow-ups, catching the stuff that would otherwise slip. The longer you use it, the more it picks up: your voice, your relationships, your preferences, your routines, what you actually care about. Jean-Denis Greze and Tony Vincent are the right team for something this hard. JDG was CTO at Plaid and an engineering leader at Dropbox. Tony led product and AI at Google and design at Dropbox. Welcome, JDG, Tony, and the Town team, to the a16z family.I By @arampell and @venturetwins

One of the cleanest and most beautiful European cities I’ve been to. The energy is electric here. ⚡️

i ran a social experiment this weekend put a laptop in the kitchen which transcribes everything my son says and dispenses rewards and punishment in the form of screen time came home after a few hours and found a video of him saying “I love you” on repeat beside the mic 😂

Europe via Atlantic kinda summer Thanks for hosting @EvanticCapital @MattEvantic

Marc Rowan has quietly built Apollo from a distressed-focused private equity firm into one of the most important financial institutions in the world, now managing over $1T in assets and becoming the largest provider of retirement income globally. In this fantastic conversation we covered lessons at Drexel from Michael Milken, Apollo’s origin story from a cold call from France, why AI could outgrow venture equity, and Apollo’s “play to win” culture. We also connected over our shared belief that “Opportunities live between fields of expertise.” This was really fun, hope you enjoy! cc @apolloglobal

Compliance is painful, bureaucratic, and often paper-based, so it has long persisted as being manual and human intensive. That friction has historically made compliance a graveyard for startups. But AI may finally go from "good enough to pilot" to "good enough to trust". In legal, broad model choice and consistently high accuracy gave teams the confidence to finally embrace AI. Many LLMs now score 80-100% on LegalBench’s 162 legal reasoning tasks. This matters directly for compliance, because compliance is essentially applied legal reasoning under operational constraints, built on the same core tasks: reading regulatory text, applying rules to fact patterns, identifying exceptions, and flagging ambiguities. Full piece from a16z's @jamdac and @astrange: a16z.news/p/everything-every…

In legal, broad model choice and consistently high accuracy gave teams the confidence to finally embrace AI. Top frontier LLMs now score 85% on most of LegalBench's 162 legal reasoning tasks, at or above human expert performance. This matters directly for compliance, because compliance is essentially applied legal reasoning under business/operational constraints, built on the same core tasks: reading regulatory text, applying rules to fact patterns, identifying exceptions, and flagging ambiguities.

Finally someone understands why I invested 3000 euros in @compai

I assume this is the sort of article @compliantvc goes to bed dreaming about.

AI’s next generational company might come from its least sexy market: compliance! The US spends $40B on compliance labor. And yet the system still doesn’t work. "Compliance officer" has been the 5th fastest-growing occupation over the past two decades, with 400,000 employed in the US alone. Every dollar that moves through a company triggers compliance somewhere: payroll, taxes, payments, KYC, AML, audits, reporting. The old answer was hire more people. The new answers are much better 👇 New post by @jamdac & me great companies to watch. What else should we be thinking of?

The boring work is where the leverage is. As AI pushes more decisions, handoffs, and workflows into software, companies need a better way to prove what happened and why. Compliance becomes less about paperwork and more about operational trust. That’s the Emberlink thesis.

These are also not very obvious opportunities as software is still new to these realms Case in point Vanta took years to establish their GRC category and in general once established they can be large markets @jamdac does a great job explaining how one can find non obvious opportunities

Earlier in my career, RegTech was the ultimate startup graveyard: mission-critical products with near-impossible sales cycles. Compliance was treated as a pure cost center, so enterprises responded to rising complexity the only way they knew how: ballooning teams (despite decreasing labor availability), growing backlogs, and more manual pain. It's amazing how fast AI is flipping competitive dynamics, whereby “boring” operational layers of a company have become genuine points of differentiation. Faster KYC/B means faster revenue. Better AML means fewer good customers lost. Enterprises are quickly realizing the bottleneck to true AI deployment is whether the system is explainable, auditable, and controllable enough for regulated environments. To keep up, this era requires moving from compliance systems built pre-cloud to those that codify years of institutional logic and keep current all internal and external data sources and partners, even as they rapidly change. Great read by @jamdac and @astrange on a category getting more of the attention it deserves.

especially true in fintech be too conservative and competitors will crush you on speed underinvest in compliance and you won't have a business for long excellent compliance is hard to build, but it's also very hard to compete against