Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm known as a16z, is renaming its crypto fund to “a16z Frontier” and broadening its mandate to include AI and other emerging technologies, according to an email shared with newsletter subscribers on Thursday.
The firm, one of the largest backers of the crypto industry, said the move is “an expansion” and that crypto remains a focus. “We will continue to invest in crypto and related ventures and advocate for sensible crypto regulation,” a16z wrote.
Chris Dixon, a general partner who leads the crypto team, will head the renamed fund with a16z founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and general partners Eddy Lazzarin and Guy Wuollet. The firm’s bets include Coinbase, the Solana blockchain network, and Uniswap, a platform for swapping tokens without an intermediary.
Blockchains recede into the background
Dixon argued that blockchains—shared digital ledgers that record ownership without a bank in the middle—have faded into the background of products people already use. “Wall Street and fintech companies now regularly launch products built on blockchains. Does that make them crypto companies? The label matters less now,” he wrote, adding that it makes more sense to define companies “by what they do rather than by the technologies they use.”
In January, a16z said it had raised more than $15 billion across its funds. Co-founder Ben Horowitz wrote in a firm post that the mission “starts with winning the key architectures of the future—AI and crypto.”
Long-horizon bets and AI’s next wave
Dixon expects more “native use cases,” which he defines as “brand-new activities you couldn’t do before,” since AI so far has mostly made existing work like coding “faster, better, and cheaper.” Early versions, he says, “will look strange and unserious, like toys and hobbies,” before some grow into mainstream products.
The new label covers startups “building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop,” a bet Dixon says goes back more than a decade. “When I joined a16z in 2013, I made these kinds of long-horizon investments a focus,” he wrote. “The growth of smartphones made cameras, sensors, and chips better and cheaper, enabling new devices like drones, AR/VR headsets, and wearables. That theme led to investments in Oculus and drone startups like Skydio and Zipline.”
The next wave, he says, includes “autonomous machines that can perceive, reason, and act in the physical world” as well as advances in biology and medicine. He also envisions a post-AGI society, referring to artificial general intelligence, a still-theoretical AI that can match or beat humans at nearly all thinking tasks.
Crypto stays in the picture because Dixon sees it giving AI agents—programs that act on their own—a way to pay each other. “Crypto can give new networks native economic capabilities, enable machine-to-machine transactions, and create new ways to bootstrap them,” he wrote.
Dixon made a similar argument in 2022, when crypto’s total market value had fallen about two-thirds from its 2021 peak. “What I look at is not prices,” he said then, pointing to developer and entrepreneur activity as the core metric.
His post gives no size for the renamed fund, so the latest figure on record is the $2.2 billion announced in May.
