Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz continues to go big on cryptocurrency, even though Bitcoin has seen a big drop this year along with the overall stock market.
Partner Chris Dixon announced that Andreessen Horowitz has raised a new crypto fund totaling $4.5 billion. Of this amount, $1.5 billion will be dedicated to seed investments, and $3 billion to venture investments. This brings the firm’s total crypto/web3 funds raised to over $7.6 billion.
Dixon said the firm is going to use these funds to invest in promising web3 startups at every stage. He is excited about developments in web3 games, DeFi, decentralized social media, self-sovereign identity, layer 1 and layer 2 infrastructure, bridges, DAOs & governance, NFT communities, privacy, creator monetization, regenerative finance, new applications of ZK proofs, decentralized content & story creation, and many other areas.
A16z will also keep growing its operating teams so that it will continue providing the best services to founders. These operating functions include:
- Research and engineering, which helps portfolio companies solve their most important technical challenges in areas like cryptography, mechanism design, protocol design, and tokenomics; as well as conducting original research to advance the science and technology of the next generation of the internet.
- Security, which helps in areas like key management, smart contract auditing, and formal verification, along with application and infrastructure security.
- Talent and people, which helps with recruiting executive, technical, and product talent, plus developing organizational frameworks to support scaling.
- Legal and regulatory, which helps our portfolio companies navigate regulatory uncertainty, and charts pathways for DAOs and decentralization.
- Go-to-market, which helps with marketing, communications, content, growth, strategic partnerships, and more.
