For nearly a decade, Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm was one of venture capital’s biggest backers of blockchain. Now it is dropping the word from its name. Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon V
For nearly a decade, Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm was one of venture capital’s biggest backers of blockchain. Now it is dropping the word from its name.
Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture firm known as a16z, said on Oct. 22 that its crypto fund will now be called a16z Frontier. The renamed unit will look beyond blockchain to artificial intelligence, robotics and other new technologies.
The firm says it isn’t leaving crypto behind. “We will continue to invest in crypto and related ventures,” managing partner Chris Dixon wrote in a post announcing the change.
He made the case that blockchain technology now runs largely in the background.
“The label matters less now,” he wrote. “It makes more sense to define companies by what they do.”
The move still reverses what the firm said just five months ago. In May, a16z said its $2.2 billion fifth crypto fund would stay focused on crypto rather than move into AI or robotics.
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a16z launched its crypto unit in 2018 with a $350 million fund. It was built to buy digital assets and back blockchain projects. The firm has since raised about $9.8 billion across five funds.
Its portfolio includes Coinbase and Uniswap, a decentralized exchange where people trade tokens straight from their wallets with no middleman.
It also co-led a funding round for Kalshi, a prediction market where users trade on the outcomes of real-world events.
Dixon will keep leading the fund alongside co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and general partners Eddy Lazzarin and Guy Wuollet.
General partner Ali Yahya, who joined in 2017 as the crypto team’s first full-time hire, is reportedly planning to leave and start his own company.
The shift already shows in its deals. In June, the fund led a $33 million seed round for Ornn, a startup building financial products for the market in AI computing power.
Rival firms are making similar moves. Paradigm, another crypto-focused venture firm, announced a $1.2 billion fund in July that reaches beyond crypto.
Haun Ventures, led by Katie Haun, raised $1 billion in May and is focusing on payments and AI agents that act on their own.
a16z has said that stablecoins, or tokens pegged to the U.S. dollar, along with tokenized assets and prediction markets, are where blockchain already has practical uses.
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