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Spotting Trends with a16z VC

Validated Individual Expert

Watching VC money can help you spot trends early.

A16z is one VC you MUST watch.

Here's what @a16z has looked at so far in Q1 2023 🧵👇

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a private venture capital firm founded in 2009.

They invest in both early-stage start-ups and established growth companies across various industries, including healthcare, consumer, crypto, gaming, fintech, education, and enterprise IT

AUM: $35B

Investment Focus:

• BioTech

• Consumer

• Enterprise IT

• Crypto

• FinTech

• Games

[Narratives/Trends]

AI is a huge trend a16z is hopping on, evident from investments in:

• $300M to OpenAI (AI research)

• $50M to HippocraticAI (Medical AI)

• $100M to Pinecone (Vector database)

• $97.4M to Replit (AI tool called Ghostwriter)

Other trends are:

[A16Z Crypto]

Largest portfolio holdings:

$UNI - $74.40M

$COMP - $8.82M

$MKR - $2.59M

Portfolio performance👇

Comparison with other VCs

Credits: @defi_mochi's VC trackooor dashboard

Top 5 crypto investments Q1 2023

1️⃣ Story Protocol (@StoryProtocol)

Raise: $29.3

Seed Lead

investor: A16Z

Other investors: Hashed, Mirana Corp, DAO5, Samsung Next and more

TLDR of Story Protocol:

• Story Protocol is a web3 technology designed to revolutionize how narrative universes are created.

• It offers a way to create, govern, and license IP on-chain.

• Potential to change the way we create and consume stories.

2️⃣ LayerZero Labs (@LayerZero_Labs)

Raise: $120M, Series B

Lead investor: A16z

Other investors: Circle Ventures, Sequoia, OpenSea, Christie's

TLDR;

• Blockchain messaging protocol developer that allows dApps to go cross-chain

• Solves the problem of cross-chain communication by providing a way for dapps to communicate with each other without having to worry about the underlying blockchains.

3️⃣ Capsule Wallets Raise: Stealth raise

Lead investor: A16z

Other investors: Spice Capital, Celo, Sommelier Finance

TLDR of Capsule

• Capsule Wallets is a crypto wallet infrastructure provider dedicated to helping developers create wallets with interoperable transactions.

• Provides SDKs that make it easy for developers to create wallets that can interact with multiple blockchains.

4️⃣ Town (HNT Labs)

Raise: $25M, Series

A Lead investor: A16z

Other investors: Benchmark, Framework Ventures

TLDR of Town & HNT Labs;

• Here Not There Labs develops a fully decentralized chat protocol for online communities.

• They are the developer of Towns, a protocol and a web-based chat app designed to facilitate self-owned and self-governed online communities.

5️⃣ Stelo Labs

Raise: $6M, Seed

Lead investor: A16z

Other investors: First Round Capital, Opensea Ventures, Chainforest

TLDR of Stelo Labs;

• Stelo Labs is a software company that protects users from phishing, fraud, and scams.

• They provide a solution that allows users to avoid phishing attacks and comprehend transactions before signing them.

Top 5 non-crypto investments Q1 2023

1️⃣ OpenAI - $300M The company behind ChatGPT developing generative A solutions and receives backing from Microsoft, Tiger Global, Sequoia and more. This is riding on the AI narrative.

2️⃣ Orbital Therapeutics - $270M Orbital Therapeutics is a BioTech company developing new treatments for eye diseases. They use gene therapy to deliver drugs directly to the eye, which could potentially cure or slow the progression of a number of eye diseases.

3️⃣ Character ai - $150M Character AI using AI to create realistic and engaging characters for video games and other applications. They use machine learning to generate visually appealing and emotionally resonant characters.

4️⃣ Pinecone - $100M Pinecone is a company developing a platform to help businesses collect and analyze customer feedback. They make it easy for businesses to create surveys, collect feedback, and analyze the results.

5️⃣ Replit - $97.4M Replit is an integrated development environment (IDE). This is also part of the investment trend regarding generative AI tech. Case in point, Replit, is a code-generating AI-powered tool called Ghostwriter for its IDE.

A16z Enjoyooors @DefiIgnas@crypto_linn@crypthoem@defi_mochi@OvrCldJonny@0xTindorr@DeFi_Cheetah@LouisCooper_@defiprincess_@milesdeutscher@francescoweb3@0xFinish@TheDeFISaint@Hercules_Defi@Louround_@TheDeFinvestor@ViktorDefi@alpha_pls@CJCJCJCJ_@arndxt_xo

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