a16z

According to a report by Reuters, enterprise-level AI company Clay announced the completion of a $115 million Series D financing round, led by Wellington, with participation from Sequoia Capital, StepStone, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Perennial, Meritech, DST, CapitalG, and others, raising its post-investment valuation to $7.1 billion.Clay stated that its AI agents can create real-time business and customer profiles based on external data such as CRM, and automatically build and execute workflows according to corporate goals. Currently, companies such as Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Stripe are using its products.

According to GMGN data, influenced by the attention of a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen on related accounts, the market capitalization of Robinhood Meme Coin FLYBRAIN briefly surged past 30 million dollars, with an intraday increase of over 670 times, currently reported at 29.3 million dollars.According to market news, Meme Coin prices are highly volatile and easily affected by celebrity attention and market sentiment, please be aware of trading risks.

AI-native CRM company Lightfield has completed a $47 million Series A funding round, led by a16z, with participation from Maverick Capital, Coatue, Greylock, Lightspeed, Audacious Ventures, and Alumni Ventures. Founders and individual investors such as Guillermo Rauch, Immad Akhund, Mati Staniszewski, Jeff Wang, Scott Belsky, Avichal Garg, Nick Talken, and Zack Kisner also participated in this round of financing.The funds will be used to accelerate growth and expand AI Agent capabilities. Lightfield focuses on automatically integrating customer interaction data, building an enterprise "world model," allowing Agents to autonomously develop business opportunities, advance deals, and manage customers. Since its launch in November 2025, over 5,000 companies have registered.

According to Forbes, Andreessen Horowitz and Accel co-led a Series E funding round of over $2 billion for AI coding agent company Cognition, with a latest valuation of $48 billion, a significant increase from $26 billion four months ago. More than thirty institutions, including Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Avenir, and NVIDIA, participated in the follow-on investment.Cognition's AI coding agent product Devin has seen its operating revenue grow from $492 million in May to nearly $900 million, with The Information predicting its annualized revenue by the end of the year could reach $4 billion to $5 billion.

The a16z crypto research team today released a new version of the open-source zkVM Jolt, called Lattice Jolt. This version has the same architecture as the previous version but changes the underlying cryptography from elliptic curves to lattices, while achieving post-quantum security, a 2-3 times speed increase for provers and verifiers, and proof sizes below 100 KB.Lattice Jolt replaces the previous elliptic curve-based Dory with a new polynomial commitment scheme Akita based on the Module-SIS assumption, targeting full 128-bit security. Akita was developed by researchers and engineers from LayerZero in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Southern California, and the a16z crypto team. On the same machine, Lattice Jolt proofs exceed 2 million RISC-V cycles per second using only the CPU, and over 10 million cycles per second with Apple Metal GPU acceleration, with prover space reduced to about 200 bytes per cycle.

a16z related project speedrun launches Alpha Fellowship, with the application deadline on October 11. This program is aimed at highly technical students, dropouts, and recent graduates, supporting builders in the earliest stages. The program takes place in San Francisco and is operated by the speedrun team in collaboration with EO Ventures.The founder track can receive up to $250,000 in investment, over $1 million in partner credits (AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, etc.), speedrun automatic final interview (up to $1 million investment), office hours, co-working space, and an 8-week in-person experience (from January 11 to March 5). The talent track offers a 4-week in-person experience (from February 8 to March 5), introducing portfolio companies, office hours, fireside chats, and co-working space.Speakers and mentors include a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen, Substack founder Chris Best, a16z general partner Andrew Chen, EO Ventures founding general partner Roland Fryer, among others. The investment terms are $150,000 for 5% SAFE plus a $100,000 follow-on investment within 18 months. This program is limited to software engineers, requiring authorization for full-time work in the U.S.; students may apply but must commit to full-time participation.

a16z's AI infrastructure team has successfully backed two acquisitions within five days: Cursor has been acquired by SpaceX, and Stripe announced the acquisition of OpenRouter. According to The Information, the total value of a16z's holdings corresponding to these two investments has exceeded $8 billion.In 2024, a16z participated in Cursor's $60 million Series A round, when the company's valuation was only $400 million. Now, SpaceX is acquiring Cursor for $60 billion. Bloomberg previously reported that a16z is Cursor's largest external shareholder, holding about 10%, which is valued at approximately $6 billion based on the acquisition price.In 2024, a16z established its first $1.25 billion infrastructure-focused fund. The Information states that the two transactions involving Cursor and OpenRouter are enough for the related fund to return all principal to LPs and also provide additional profits. This year, a16z raised another $1.7 billion for its infrastructure fund and recently raised an additional $1.1 billion specifically for AI hardware. Martin Casado, head of AI infrastructure, noted that a few years ago, only about 5% of the startup projects he encountered were in hardware, and now that figure is close to 20%.

According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, the suspected largest HYPE holding institution of a16z continued to buy HYPE today. This institution previously spent 66.4 million USDC to purchase 816,000 HYPE at an average price of 81.3 dollars a week ago; 8 hours ago, it transferred 13.05 million USDC to Hyperliquid and purchased HYPE through a TWAP method.Currently, this institution has bought and staked 5.201 million HYPE, worth approximately 445 million dollars, with an average purchase price of about 67.2 dollars, and the current floating profit is approximately 95.18 million dollars.

AI infrastructure startup Gimlet Labs has completed a $300 million financing round, raising the company's valuation to $3 billion. This round of financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Arm Holdings and Microsoft's venture fund M12.Gimlet Labs primarily helps clients allocate AI tasks to different types of chips and is collaborating with Arm to make its software compatible with various chip technologies from Arm.

a16z Charts compiled recent data indicating that since January 2025, tech recruitment has shown a clear preference for years of experience, while the requirements for the number of skills have decreased, with a change of about 5% to 10%.The charts show that companies are lowering the weight of skill lists when screening positions, and are instead placing more emphasis on candidates' accumulated experience. This change is related to the skill gaps brought about by AI, which is rewriting the safety and employment landscape.

The venture capital firm a16z crypto published an article stating that blockchain throughput has increased more than 100 times in five years, with some production systems now capable of processing tens of thousands of transactions per second. The article indicates that throughput alone cannot explain when transactions will settle; financial markets require predictability, including guarantees or censorship resistance, as well as ordering guarantees, to ensure transactions settle on time and operate under rules that participants can understand in advance.The article claims that resilience means no single operator controls access. a16z researchers introduced the concept of Strong Chain Quality, reserving block space to allow effective transactions to enter through multiple routes. Ordering rules must be clear, such as priority fees or venue rules, to avoid MEV and achieve fair price time priority. Additionally, privacy must be achieved through cryptography before execution, hiding intent until it is included in the final transaction, allowing the market to be auditable without real-time previews of unexecuted orders.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has publicly released its request for comments regarding "Novel ETFs," which may hold crypto assets or adopt unconventional strategies. The disagreement centers on whether the filing documents should remain public before the fund begins trading and how quickly the review process should be. Crypto asset management firm Grayscale and the crypto policy organization Crypto Council for Innovation (CCI) support establishing an optional confidential filing period to reduce competitors from submitting imitation documents.Charles Schwab opposes complete confidentiality and suggests that filing documents should be made public at least 75 days in advance. Grayscale requests that the SEC respond within 45 days, while CCI argues that the confidentiality process should not extend the automatic effectiveness or review period. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (A16z) supports shortening the review time but emphasizes that the rigor of the review should not be reduced; trading firm Jane Street believes that accelerating the process could lead to a decline in product quality, competitiveness, and liquidity.Currently, there are 174 ETFs related to crypto assets in the U.S., with BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) managing approximately $61 billion in assets, accounting for about 38% of the total assets of related ETFs. The SEC will decide whether to adjust the confidentiality arrangements for filings and the speed of the review.

According to Cointelegraph, participants in the crypto industry such as a16z, Grayscale, and the Crypto Council for Innovation (CCI) urged the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to avoid implementing a one-size-fits-all restriction on "novel" exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and instead assess them based on individual risk parameters. Three comment letters were submitted on August 31, just as the SEC's 60-day window for public comments on the regulation of new ETFs was nearing its end. The SEC launched this consultation on June 30, seeking opinions on whether existing regulations are sufficient, how such funds should be regulated, and whether the registration process needs adjustments.a16z believes that crypto-based ETPs have now benefited from more mature market infrastructure, including exchange-approved listing standards and established disclosure requirements, and therefore should not be grouped with products that hold private assets or adopt other novel strategies. Grayscale similarly argues that digital asset products with mature compliance and disclosure records should not face new portfolio conditions or disclosure regimes simply because they are classified as "novel." CCI called for comparable regulatory efficiency between ETFs and non-ETF ETPs while retaining existing investor protection measures.There is widespread opposition to potential regulatory adjustments that could impose additional requirements or delay product launches, but there are differences in classification, approval processes, and terminology. The dispute over the ETF label is particularly pronounced: a16z proposed that the term ETF be used only for funds under the Investment Company Act of 1940, while Grayscale believes that ETFs should describe economic characteristics rather than legal shells.

AI-native operating system Metal, aimed at the private capital market, announced the completion of a $4.5 million seed round financing, led by a16z, Speedrun, and Y Combinator, with participation from Pioneer Fund, Rebel Fund, Gaingels, Indus Valley Capital, Team Ignite VC, Goodwater Capital, and Phaze Ventures.This round of financing will accelerate its development of software that founders can use during fundraising and continue to use throughout the capital formation process. Metal also released a paper on the trends in the private capital market.

According to Bloomberg, the stablecoin cross-border remittance startup Felix Pago announced the completion of a $200 million Series B funding round.This round of financing includes $87 million in equity financing and $113 million in credit line financing. The equity financing was co-invested by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), while the credit line financing comes from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund.Felix Pago is currently one of the most representative stablecoin remittance networks in Latin America, primarily using WhatsApp as the front-end entry point, and leveraging USDC and blockchain as the underlying settlement infrastructure, significantly reducing the cost and time for cross-border remittances from the United States to Mexico.

The venture capital firm a16z's crypto division, a16z crypto, is hiring a Head of Social Media, with a salary range of $199,000 to $232,000.This position is aimed at candidates who are extremely active online, understand crypto and internet culture, can create and deliver content, and can showcase intelligence in a non-corporate or non-awkward manner. Responsibilities cover podcasts, investments, events, editing, memes, short video editing, and social media strategy. This is a remote position, requiring some travel or attendance at offline events.

According to TechCrunch, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has expanded the size of its fifth growth fund from $6.75 billion established in January this year to $8.5 billion, adding $1.75 billion in new funds. The fund primarily invests in growth-stage startups that are expanding products, exploring new markets, and scaling businesses.This fundraising comes just days after a16z announced the completion of its $1.1 billion Machine Era Fund. This fund mainly focuses on the AI hardware sector, with investment areas including infrastructure startups in chips, storage, networking, and data storage. David George, head of a16z's growth investment team, stated that the relevant growth fund has invested in over 100 companies in the past seven years. As AI companies enter the growth stage more rapidly, their financing needs and valuations are also rising. a16z is currently focusing on areas such as enterprise and consumer AI, defense technology, robotics, software and hardware infrastructure, and medical technology.