Andreessen Horowitz has broadened the scope of its newest crypto fund, recasting the effort under a wider technology mandate. In a post published Thursday at noon ET, managing partner Chris Dixon said the firm is expanding the fund beyond crypto startups to what he called “frontier startups,” or bets on new technologies whose markets may take years to form.
The team is now operating under the name a16z Frontier, and the old a16zcrypto.com blog address now redirects to a new domain. Dixon described the shift as an expansion rather than a retreat, saying the firm will continue to invest in crypto and related ventures while also advocating for sensible crypto regulation.
a16z closed its fifth crypto fund at $2.2 billion in May, bringing the total raised across its five crypto funds to $9.8 billion. Dixon did not disclose the size of the new fund in Thursday’s post, and he did not say how much of its capital could be deployed outside crypto.
Why Dixon says the crypto label matters less
Dixon argued that blockchains have become less visible as adoption spreads. In his view, Wall Street firms and fintech companies are already shipping products on blockchains, which makes the label itself less important than it once was. He wrote that it now makes more sense to define companies by what they do, not by the technologies they use.
He pointed to several areas that fit the broader frontier thesis: new uses of AI, robots and other autonomous machines, biology and medicine, startups that combine software, hardware, and services, and networks where people and intelligent agents transact. Crypto, he wrote, can give those systems economic capabilities of their own, including machine-to-machine transactions. He added that these examples are not meant to set hard boundaries.
Dixon said leadership of the fund will be shared with general partners Eddy Lazzarin and Guy Wuollet, along with a16z co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
Ali Yahya says he is leaving a16z
Later the same day, at 7:33 p.m. ET, general partner Ali Yahya wrote in a post on X that he had decided to leave @a16z, move to San Francisco, and start a company. The Information had reported earlier that morning that Yahya told some investors he planned to depart.
Yahya joined Dixon at a16z in 2017 after working at Google, where he said he worked on robotics as a Google Brain engineer. When the firm promoted him to general partner in 2021, it described him as the first full-time member of the crypto team.
He said his new company is still early, but will focus on building infrastructure that supports open software ecosystems. He framed the effort around a view that AI usage will shift from one person talking with one agent to many people and many agents working together. In the same post, Yahya called himself “forever an a16z superfan” and thanked the firm’s partners by name.
Another crypto investor has widened its remit
The development comes after crypto investment firm Paradigm announced a $1.2 billion fund in July and said it now works across AI, robotics, and other frontier areas.