Andreessen Horowitz just announced that the firm has raised over $15 billion in new funding. According to co-founder Ben Horowitz, this amount represents more than 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the U.S. in 2025. Even more impressive is that it boosts the firm’s total assets under management to over $90 billion, putting it in close competition with Sequoia Capital among the largest venture firms worldwide. This is particularly interesting given a16z’s friendly ties with sovereign wealth funds, including at least one from Saudi Arabia.
The firm, employing hundreds across five offices—three in California and one each in New York and Washington D.C.—has evolved into a global operation with employees spanning six continents. In December, it launched its first Asia office in Seoul focusing on crypto investments.
This newly committed capital is split across five funds: $6.75 billion for growth investments, $1.7 billion each for applications and infrastructure, $1.176 billion for “American Dynamism” (more on that shortly), $700 million for biotech and healthcare, and another $3 billion for various venture strategies. It’s a substantial amount of money, raising questions about its origins and, more importantly, its destination.
The question of where the money comes from has historically gone unanswered by the firm. When asked this week about its limited partners and the distributed-to-paid-in capital ratio (DPI)—essentially how much cash the firm has returned to investors over its 16-year history—Andreessen Horowitz didn’t reply. However, we do know that CalPERS invested $400 million in 2023, marking a significant first for a16z with a major California pension fund, likely due to transparency issues that clash with the firm’s preference for opacity. Additionally, Sanabil Investments, the venture arm of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, lists a16z among its portfolio holdings.
The Saudi connection is quite apparent. In 2023, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz appeared alongside WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann to discuss their $350 million investment in Neumann’s residential real estate venture, Flow, at a conference supported by one of Saudi Arabia’s largest sovereign funds. Horowitz described Saudi Arabia as a “startup country,” emphasizing the central role of its leadership by saying, “Saudi has a founder; you don’t call him a founder, you call him his royal highness.”
Recently, Marc Andreessen has also found another royal connection to admire. Since President Donald Trump’s election win in November 2024, Andreessen has spent considerable time at Mar-a-Lago, claiming to help shape policy on tech, business, and economics. Earlier last year, he took on an “unpaid intern” role at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, reviewing candidates for various positions in the Trump administration—not just in tech, but also within the Defense Department and intelligence agencies. Notably, Scott Kupor, a16z’s first employee from 2009, was appointed as Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management this past summer.
This is significant because a16z’s current strategy heavily emphasizes what it calls “American Dynamism”—investing in sectors like defense, aerospace, public safety, housing, education, and manufacturing. The portfolio aligns closely with Defense Department priorities, featuring companies like Anduril (autonomous defense systems), Shield AI (military drones), Saronic Technologies (autonomous naval vessels), and Castelion (hypersonic missiles). The bigger gamble is based on the belief that America must reindustrialize and reshore essential manufacturing. As a16z notes, the U.S. could deplete its entire missile inventory “in something like 8 days” in a potential conflict with China over Taiwan, taking three years to rebuild it.
Then there’s the AI investment, which might be the firm’s riskiest yet with the highest potential rewards. A16z has positioned itself at every level of the AI stack: infrastructure (Databricks), foundation models (with stakes in Mistral AI, OpenAI, and xAI), and applications (like Character.AI, among many others).
The firm has some successes to tout. Its $25 million investment in Coinbase soared to an $86 billion valuation at the 2021 IPO. Other successes include Airbnb (valued over $100 billion), Slack (acquired for $27.7 billion), and GitHub ($7.5 billion sale to Microsoft). Its portfolio lists 115 unicorns, 35 IPOs, and 241 acquisitions, according to market intelligence firm Tracxn. The firm has also made and lost money through cryptocurrency investments, although those numbers are less clear.
In a blog post released Friday morning, Ben Horowitz stated, “As the American leader in Venture Capital, the fate of new technology in the United States rests partly on our shoulders.” Such a declaration is bound to ruffle feathers at competing firms, many of which have been around for nearly 50 years, while a16z is relatively young. Horowitz positions a16z’s mission as “ensuring that America wins the next 100 years of technology.”
Whether that goal will be achieved remains uncertain. However, it’s clear that Andreessen Horowitz has mastered the art of raising substantial funds—$15 billion this time—to support a vision of American technological supremacy that connects Riyadh, Mar-a-Lago, and the Pentagon. That’s quite a proposition, and clearly, it resonates.
