a16z renames a16z Crypto to a16z Frontier, expanding investment scope to frontier startups

General a16z Frontier Chris Dixon

Today we’re announcing that we’re expanding the scope of our new fund beyond crypto startups to the broader category of frontier startups: companies building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop. To reflect this, we’re renaming a16z Crypto to a16z Frontier. This is an expansion: we will continue to invest in crypto and related ventures and advocate for sensible crypto regulation.

When we started investing in crypto, it was a world of its own. But as blockchains have become more widely used, the lines have blurred and the infrastructure has gradually receded into the background. Wall Street and fintech companies now regularly launch products built on blockchains. Does that make them crypto companies? The label matters less now. It makes more sense to define companies by what they do rather than by the technologies they use.

Our expansion also reflects an approach that has guided many of our investments for years: backing technologies that look futuristic, well before they reach the mainstream. When I joined a16z in 2013, I made these kinds of long-horizon investments a focus. One theme was new computing devices. 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 other was crypto, which I saw as a new wave built on social media and the open source movement. Social media allowed networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum to gain traction from the outside in, as people formed communities without first needing mainstream acceptance. Open source provided the model for software that anyone could inspect, modify, and build on. Blockchains extended that model from software to services and networks. This theme guided our investment in Coinbase and the creation of our crypto funds, as well as later investments in projects like Solana and Uniswap.

Now we are in the middle of another major tech wave centered on AI. The buildout of AI models and infrastructure will continue, but the tech is already sufficiently advanced to spawn a new generation of products and services. No one knows exactly what that generation will look like, but we’re beginning to catch glimpses. We’re especially interested in the new products and markets these advances will enable, including ones that don’t fit into existing categories.

Foremost is the emergence of native use cases: brand-new activities you couldn’t do before. Early applications of new technologies tend to focus on doing old things better. To date, AI has mostly been used to do existing activities — like coding and other knowledge work — faster, better, and cheaper. But soon native uses will open up entirely new, unexpected experiences. At first, many of these experiments will look strange and unserious, like toys and hobbies, but over time some will grow into mainstream products. The key to telling the difference is to understand their potential rates of improvement, the factors that can bend deceptively marginal growth into an exponential curve.

We’re lucky enough to be living through one of the most consequential curves in human history today. Technological progress is accelerating rapidly, and we’re already starting to see early signals about what a post-AGI world might look like. For one thing, software and increasingly hardware are becoming easier to create. Just as the growth of smartphones fueled an earlier computing cycle, we expect a proliferation of new devices to underpin this one. Some of these will be autonomous machines that can perceive, reason, and act in the physical world. Others will draw on advances in biology and medicine. Still others will fall somewhere, cybernetically, in between.

All these advances will present new ways of building companies. We’ll see more full-stack startups that combine software with hardware and services, as founders take advantage of new capabilities and seek new forms of defensibility. Even the idea of what it means to be a founder may change as we gain more superpowers and as AI agents become increasingly autonomous, able to act on their own. As these capabilities spread, they could change how industries are organized and even give rise to new ones.

AI will also enable entirely new kinds of networks connecting people and intelligent agents that learn, coordinate, produce, and transact. The large-scale networks we use every day were made for humans. Networks built for machines will look very different. Many will start as single-player tools and evolve into multiplayer networks. The potential here — for machine age networks — is enormous, and builders have barely begun to scratch the surface.

Blockchains will play a significant role in this transformation. Crypto has given the internet money rails that are fast, cheap, global, and programmable. Stablecoins are quickly becoming a standard tool for fintechs, established institutions, and others. And, because blockchains are programmable, both centralized and decentralized financial services can be built on top. Crypto can give new networks native economic capabilities, enable machine-to-machine transactions, and create new ways to bootstrap them.

These are examples, not boundaries. The defining companies of past waves were rarely the ones anyone predicted. As always, we expect founders to surprise us and create categories we haven’t imagined yet.

I’ll be leading the fund along with the firm’s founders Marc and Ben, and GPs Eddy Lazzarin and Guy Wuollet. Our operating teams will continue to work with our existing and future portfolio companies on regulatory, go-to-market, talent, marketing, and technical R&D.

We believe some of the most important technology waves are still ahead. Ideas that seem weird or far-fetched today will become indispensable, era-defining products of the future. If you are a founder building what comes next, please reach out.

is managing partner of a16z Frontier where he is focused on investing in companies building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop.

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