The venture capital firm that devoured Silicon Valley just raised another $15 billion

Andreessen Horowitz has just announced that the company has raised just over 15 billion dollars in new financing. This haul represents more than 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the United States in 2025, according to company co-founder Ben Horowitz, but what’s even more breathtaking is that it brings the organization to more than $90 billion in assets under management, putting it neck and neck with Sequoia Capital among the largest venture capital firms in the world. Which is entirely appropriate, since a16z appears to be very friendly with real sovereign wealth funds, including at least one from Saudi Arabia.

The company, which employs several hundred people in five offices – three in California, plus New York and Washington, DC – has grown into a global enterprise with employees on six continents. In December, it opened its first Asian office in Seoul for its crypto practice.

This newly committed capital is divided among five funds: $6.75 billion for growth investments, $1.7 billion each for applications and infrastructure, $1.176 billion for “American Dynamism” (more on that soon), $700 million for biotechnology and healthcare, and an additional $3 billion for other venture capital strategies. It’s the kind of money that makes you wonder where everything comes from and, more importantly, where everything goes.

The question “where did this come from” is one the company has consistently refused to answer. When we asked a16z this week about its limited partners and its ratio of distributed capital to paid-up capital – DPI, or how much actual cash the company has returned to investors over its 16-year history – the company did not respond. What we do know is that CalPERS invested $400 million in 2023, marking the first time in a16z’s history that it took money from a major California pension fund, likely because institutions with transparency requirements don’t really fit with the company’s preference for opacity. We also know that Sanabil Investments, the venture capital arm of the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, lists Andreessen Horowitz among its holdings.

The Saudi connection is not subtle. In 2023, Horowitz and Marc Andreessen appeared on stage with WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann to discuss their $350 million investment in his new residential real estate company, Flow. The venue was a conference supported by one of Saudi Arabia’s largest sovereign wealth funds. Horowitz hailed Saudi Arabia as a “start-up country,” adding that “Saudi Arabia has a founder; you don’t call him a founder, you call him his royal highness.”

But Marc Andreessen has found another royal to admire. Since President Donald Trump’s election victory in November 2024, Andreessen has spent many hours at Mar-a-Lago, by his own account, helping shape policy on technology, business and economics. Early last year it became “unpaid intern” at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Effectiveness, vetting candidates for the Trump administration – not only for technology roles but also for positions within the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies. Scott Kupor, a16z’s first employee in 2009, was sworn in as director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management last summer.

This is important because a16z’s current strategy is heavily tilted toward what it calls “American dynamism” — a practice that invests in defense, aerospace, public safety, housing, education and manufacturing. The portfolio aligns remarkably well with the Department of Defense’s priorities: Anduril (autonomous defense systems), Shield AI (military drones), Saronic Technologies (autonomous naval vessels), and Castelion (hypersonic missiles). The biggest bet is that America must reindustrialize and relocate its critical production, especially since, as a16z itself points out, the United States would exhaust its entire missile inventory “in about 8 days” in a conflict with China over Taiwan, then need three years to rebuild it.

Then there’s the AI ​​bet, which might be the company’s riskiest and highest-reward play yet. a16z has positioned itself at all levels of the AI ​​stack: infrastructure (Databricks), foundation models (with participations in Mistral AI, OpenAI and xAI) and applications (Character.AIamong many other portfolio companies).

The company has victories to highlight. Its $25 million investment in Coinbase grew into an $86 billion valuation in the 2021 IPO. There’s Airbnb (public for over $100 billion), Slack (acquired for $27.7 billion), and GitHub ($7.5 billion for Microsoft). It is wallet includes 115 unicorns, 35 IPOs and 241 acquisitions, according to market information company Tracxn. The company also made and lost money from purchasing cryptocurrency tokens, although these numbers are less visible.

In a blog post Published Friday morning, Horowitz writes that “as America’s leading venture capitalist, the fate of new technology in the United States rests partly on our shoulders.” That’s the kind of statement that’s sure to cause a stir among competing companies, some of which have been around for more than 50 years, compared to the much younger company, a16z. Horowitz defines a16z’s mission as “ensuring America wins the next 100 years of technology.”

Whether this will happen remains to be seen. What is certain is that Andreessen Horowitz is a master in the art of raising funds – $15 billion this time – to finance a vision of American technological domination that extends to Riyadh, Mar-a-Lago and the Pentagon. It’s quite an argument, and clearly, it works.