By @DavidGeorge83 and @RaghuRaghuram
There has never been an investing environment like what we’re living through right now. Normally, investors hope and pray to catch the beginning of one generational S-curve of technology adoption. Today we’re watching at least six mega-trends emerge:
Enterprises are putting AI tools to work across every part of their organizations. We believe there is no upper bound on the demand to turn compute into business outcomes.
Consumer AI is barely even a thing yet, aside from ChatGPT’s form factor beginning to replace the search engine. But we expect it will be transformational when the time is right.
American Dynamism has entered a new era. National security, industrial policy, and technological progress are converging to rebuild the physical systems that underpin the country, from defense and manufacturing to energy, infrastructure, and space.
Robotics and autonomy are poised to be the biggest distributed infrastructure deployment in our lifetime, transforming how people and products move and interact in every setting, in our factories, on our roads, and everywhere in between.
Healthcare is 18% of GDP and represents one of the biggest areas of opportunity, as our biology becomes programmable and we use AI to improve systems.
To power the above, the entire compute stack is being rebuilt for the AI-era.
In moments of opportunity like these, we keep coming back to the founder as the key to building generational businesses. Technology has become so powerful for company-builders, and yet so unevenly diffused in the economy, killer founders who understand it will always be the premier destination for investment capital. Our job as investors is to identify these founders and help them however they need.
Today, a16z Growth has closed additional capital, bringing our fifth Growth fund to a total of $8.5B. With so much opportunity in the market right now, this became the obvious thing to do for both founders and our Limited Partners.
Helping founders accelerate through the curve
Every founder who’s been through the scaling journey knows that there are inflection points where their early instincts aren’t enough anymore. Companies must become multi-product, multi-channel, multi-geography, often all at the same time. Databricks had to bank through the corner and evolve “Lakehouse” into a dominant platform. SpaceX evolved from a launch provider into a global communications, data infrastructure and AI company. Greatness isn’t easy.