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What changed, and what is the evidence.
Oct 22, 2026 · Funding · posted
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Chris Dixon and Ben Horowitz on why a16z Crypto is now a16z Frontier, a fund for the "outer planet" founders building things that don't fit into any existing category: "Years ago, [crypto] was sort of its own world with its own companies… |
Today, a16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier. Since joining a16z in 2013, @cdixon has focused on technologies that look futuristic well before they reach the mainstream. Those themes led to investments in Oculus, Skydio, Zipline, Coinbase,… |
people who left @OpenAI, @spacexai, @stripe and @Tesla to build something new in stealth on X: 1/ @hyhieu226: ex-openai and xai technical staff, google brain researcher, imo silver medalist. 2/ @rochi5ha: 5 years engineering at rippling,… |
America’s capital markets are an underrated strategic weapon. Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf on turning that edge into a tool for national priorities: "The US capital market structure is, it's not like it's 10% better than anyone else, it's… |
🚨 EKA Robotics raises $150M in Series A funding. Can robots be both highly capable and truly general-purpose? EKA Robotics is betting on it. Its Vision-Force-Action (VFA) model combines dexterous manipulation with fast, reliable physical… |
In the '90s, general-purpose chips wiped out the specialists. The original Thinking Machines, Cray Computer, and a wave of others shut down, and their best ideas got absorbed into other chips. Zain Asgar of @gimletlabs argues the… |
Ekin Dogus Cubuk of @periodiclabs on why AI has to learn from the physical world, and building their own lab to close that loop: "One of the more fundamental ways of making things around us is powder synthesis... You can actually, using… |
AI models are getting close to designing hardware better than humans, and that shifts where the hard problems are: - Better simulation, so physical builds become confirmation instead of experiments - Demand shifts toward parts, machining… |
"It took me three months to design it, but it's nine months until I can actually start to use it." Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on the manufacturing bottleneck between designing hardware with AI and actually getting it built: "Let's say… |
For AI to become a superhuman hardware engineer, it has to learn from the physical world, and real-world data is hard to get: - It's non-uniform and constantly changing - It's sparse: you can't measure everything all the time - It's… |
AI is on track to become a superhuman hardware designer, but design is only the beginning. The interface between bits and atoms is lossy, and turning designs into real hardware gets harder at every level: 1. Sourcing off-the-shelf parts… |
FUNDRAISE 💰: @frontrunvc flagged @EkaRobotics on April 22nd. 181 days later: $150M Series A co-led by @a16z and @fprimecapital. 🫡 https://t.co/NQ75quaNLO https://t.co/QxndUWtpOr |
🚨 BREAKING: @EkaRobotics just raised $150M in Series A funding at a $1.45 billion valuation, led by a16z and F-Prime Capital. The founding team is exceptional. @pulkitology is an MIT professor. Tuomas Haarnoja is a former DeepMind… |
We believe solving dexterous manipulation is one of the largest opportunities in robotics. That’s why we're thrilled to lead Eka Robotics’ Series A. Much of the world's physical economy still depends on people using their hands, and that… |
Gavin Baker on the other side of Ben's bandwidth story: at the peak of the 2000 bubble, 97% of America's fiber sat dark, and today there are no dark GPUs. "I had, depending on how you look at it, the privilege and the misfortune of being a… |
Ben Horowitz on what LoudCloud, his early cloud company, taught him about today's AI neoclouds, and why they face an opposite problem today: "It can end up being like a very dangerous arbitrage business, where you can get upside-down… |
Compute scarcity, in one chart Old GPUs are turning into appreciating assets https://t.co/nxwk0EyKtX https://t.co/pnnOhT8Aab |
.@heronpower CEO Drew Baglino on the 40-year streak that kept US electricity flat while the economy grew, and why it just ended: "We benefited from energy efficiency from the '70s... until like the 2010s. You saw efficiency everywhere...… |
Dmitri Dolgov of @Waymo on how to tell if you’re one year away from shipping or ten: "One pattern that I've seen over and over again is do you have convergence of discovery? The problems that you are seeing today, how different are they… |
Former CEO of Intel, Pat Gelsinger, sees more AI data center delays coming due to lack of energy capacity: "We just need more capacity, and fundamentally, energy capacity omewhat dampens how you fork we can get on AI. Because, you know,… |
"Energy Capacity = Economic Capacity" Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on why America's power grid is the ceiling on growth: "We went through 10 to 15 years where essentially I was taking coal offline at the rate I was adding renewables, and… |
Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on getting hired at 18, designing Intel's chips while finishing his PhD, and arguing with his Stanford professors: "I'm 16 years old. I accidentally win a scholarship. I go to tech school, skip my last year… |
Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger with a16z's Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller on the next wave of semiconductor innovation and the physical constraints shaping the AI buildout: Drawing on his experience designing Intel's 386 and 486… |
a16z's chart made the crossover visible: agent token use passed human token use on OpenRouter back in February, and by August agents were burning 7.3 trillion tokens against 1.4 trillion for humans, roughly five times over. Futurum's… |
AWS CEO Matt Garman says they could sell every GPU to the frontier labs, but deliberately hold capacity back for startups to support the full ecosystem: "We really think intentionally about our allocation strategy. We're great partners… |
AWS CEO Matt Garman with a16z's Raghu Raghuram on the biggest cloud provider in the world being rebuilt for the agentic era: $220B in CapEx for 2026, two million NVIDIA GPUs on order, AWS's AI chips sold out through next year, and a new… |
a16z's Alex Immerman, David George, and Sarah Wang on why a data center can lower your electricity bill: "It may seem counterintuitive, but a data center can help lower your electricity rate. A recent US study showed that for every 10%… |
The US grid plans to add 86 gigawatts this year. Here's where it's coming from: - Solar: 43.4 GW - Batteries: 24.3 GW - Wind: 11.8 GW - Gas: 6.3 GW - New nuclear: 0 GW The AI labs are planning for hundreds of gigawatts. Solar is the one… |
.@basepowerco has raised $2.5B to bring affordable, reliable energy to people’s homes across America. They're building a new nationwide power company by rebuilding every layer from scratch. Three years in: - Built a home battery factory in… |
Left: Texas's grid only maxes out about 200 hours a year, roughly 2% of the time. Right: New data centers that agree to cut back during peak hours can skip the wait for more capacity. US grids could add 100 GW of them without building a… |
Texas just froze new data center permits: - Its queue went from 63 GW to 474 GW in 18 months, more than 5x record peak demand - Only 9.5 GW is approved and about 4.3 GW is actually running - The rest is duplicates, speculation, and… |
"At the end of 2024, Texas' grid operator had 63 GW of large new customers in its queue. By this June, that figure reached 474 GW, more than five times record peak demand." "Then Texas hit pause." "Developers routinely spam requests across… |
🇯🇵 https://t.co/llH4rjVHbi |
America has 16,876 machine shops. 83% employ fewer than 20 people. Just nine employ more than 500. New defense companies are moving from prototypes to mass production, and every missile, drone, ship, and rocket they ultimately produce… |
It takes *thousands* of suppliers to build one missile, one aircraft, one ship, or one drone. At the top of the chain is the company that delivers the finished technology. Beneath it, makers of engines and guidance sensors, actuators and… |
Vice President JD Vance at the groundbreaking of Saronic's Port Alpha in Brownsville, Texas: "We are rebuilding the American dream from the ground up by employing and investing in American workers and American businesses." "What this… |
World Labs co-founders Dr. Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson on compute as the constraint, and the Slack message that convinced them to go all-in on their Atlas model: Fei-Fei: "I think [we] have total conviction about the scaling law." "I do… |
World Labs' Dr. Fei-Fei Li on why the 3D world and spatial intelligence are fundamentally different from language models: "Language is fundamentally a purely generated signal. There's no language out there. You don't go out in the nature… |
I don’t normally write these things. But this one hits a bit different. Nearly three years ago I told a16z I wanted to spend part time outside the firm helping @drfeifei start and build a frontier model company. And what followed were some… |
a16z's Martin Casado on why the word "pacing" was a misstep, and Databricks' @alighodsi on what the labs were actually asking for: Martin: "Saying security and safety is important, it is with every tech epoch, and we wanna have some… |
Databricks' @alighodsi with a16z's Martin Casado on who should be policing the AI labs: Martin: "There's kind of three proposals. The OpenAI, Anthropic one is a third party. The Elon Musk one, as far as I can tell, is the labs cross-check… |
Databricks' @alighodsi on why most companies wouldn't even notice if frontier AI models stopped advancing: "The models are smart enough, but they just don't have the context that exists inside any organization. They have not been in every… |
Databricks' @alighodsi on AI risk and adoption: Ali isn't losing sleep over the existential risk debate. He says a number of conditions would all have to be true simultaneously to enable an actual runaway takeoff scenario, and currently… |
Databricks’ @alighodsi on AI risk and adoption: Ali isn’t losing sleep over the existential risk debate. He says a number of conditions would have to be simultaneously true for a legitimate runaway take off scenario to unfold, and… |
Exa just shipped something that changes how you train and evaluate AI agents that touch the web. Snapshot gives you point-in-time access to 400 billion historical web snapshots. Not crawl metadata. Not indexed links. The actual page… |
fal's Gorkem Yurtseven and Batuhan Taskaya on how faster-than-real-time generation unlocked continuous, interactive AI video: "One of our engineers, Rehan, started streaming a live stream of continuous generations of H3 Max from his… |
.@fal's Gorkem Yurtseven and Batuhan Taskaya on making an open source video model 35x faster, and what Hollywood wanted after they built it: Last month, MiniMax released H3, an open source video model. fal rebuilt it - they cut down the… |
Greg Brockman on what solving Navier-Stokes says about the problems AI can take on next: "We actually used 10,000 agents to solve the Navier-Stokes problem." "It's both an important problem for what it is, has significant implications and… |
Greg Brockman on the defenders' window that closes when frontier AI capabilities become distributed: "Hugging Face shows... what future capabilities will be like when they are broadly diffused and in the hands of threat actors. And that… |
Greg Brockman on AGI arriving quietly and unevenly: "I think that AGI has turned out to be less of a point in time and more of this sort of fuzzy spectrum. And for me, Astra has really hit something that I'm like, 'Okay, I think this is… |
a16z's David George says AI's power law is becoming more extreme because dollars alone can compound a company's advantage: "Right now, clearly the power law is more extreme than it has been in the last 10 to 20 years of technology… |
A week of raises. @frontrunvc flagged 7 startups before they were announced. 👇 Average lead time: 116 days. 1. @rtp - 162 days ago. $35M Series A led by @oakhcft 2. @antiochrobotics - 147 days ago. $32M Series A led by @GreylockVC 3.… |
🇺🇸🇦🇪 @ElonMusk’s @BoringCompany has raised $3 billion in a Series D round led by the UAE, pushing its valuation to $23 billion, up from $5.68 billion in 2022. The funding will help build more than 150 kilometers of tunnels across the… |
EARLY: @ixianrobotics - 56 followers (Robotics) Ixian Robotics just came out of stealth. Intelligent robots to reindustrialize America. On @frontrunvc, the story started 32 days before the company had a name. aug 8: @ixianrobotics flagged.… |
Peter Thiel-Backed AI Startup Cognition Raises Funds at $48 Billion Valuation Round led by new investors Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, alongside existing backers https://t.co/Sod2JGlpEr via @WSJ |
Vals AI co-founder and CEO Rayan Krishnan with a16z's Ben Horowitz and Jennifer Li on grading AI, what it costs, and who gets to make the rules: Every big industry eventually grows an independent testing layer. AI has credit ratings to… |
The frontier AI market just got a harder-to-ignore data point from Europe. Mistral raised a 3B euro Series D announced yesterday. Samsung led, joined by EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity. Advent, BlackRock, and the Grand Duchy of… |
Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch on open source AI and why no company will want its intelligence running on someone else's grid: "If you assume that the entire economy is going to run on AI systems, enterprises will just want to… |
The window to patch software bugs is collapsing Of the bugs hackers actually exploit, ~87% are now being attacked on or before the day the bug is public knowledge That share was 23% in 2020 Charts of the Week: https://t.co/RfYfzHpbLI… |
World Labs co-founders Justin Johnson and Dr. Fei-Fei Li say Atlas unifies the two things computer vision has always kept apart: Justin: "Historically, reconstruction has been its own subfield in computer vision with its own specialized… |
Data center construction is going vertical Spend has jumped more than $25B in six months, roughly what it gained over the previous two years combined Construction job openings bottomed near 200k last year and are back above 300k Charts of… |
World Labs co-founders Justin Johnson and Dr. Fei-Fei Li say LLMs use next-token prediction, but spatial intelligence has its own equivalent: Justin: "The soft definition of AI-completeness is there's this fundamental primitive that's an… |
>blogs about ray tracing for a CS project in 2012 >co-founds World Labs in 2024 >ships Atlas in 2026, a spatial intelligence model that turns a few photos into a whole 3D world curiosity compounds https://t.co/bq771VzcKx… |
>be dr. fei-fei li >born in beijing, raised in chengdu >dad moves to new jersey, follow at age 16 >speak almost no english >parents open a dry cleaner >work the counter on weekends >get into princeton on a full scholarship >study physics,… |
World Labs co-founder Justin Johnson says Atlas can recreate the famous "Bullet Time" shot from The Matrix with iPhones: "The way they did that shot is they had a ring of hundreds of cameras. [Neo] fell over in the studio, they had… |
Old footage sitting in your camera roll could now be reconstructable as a 3D scene. World Labs co-founders Ben Mildenhall and Fei-Fei Li on how Atlas got there: Ben: "In a casual sense... I took three photos of this object, or six photos… |
We're thrilled to lead a $300M investment in Gimlet Labs. AI inference is one of the fastest-growing markets in the history of capitalism, and we are running out of nearly every physical input required to serve it. Inference demand… |
We're thrilled to lead a $300M investment in Gimlet Labs. AI inference is one of the fastest-growing market in the history of capitalism, and we are running out of nearly every physical input required to serve it. Inference demand… |
World Labs co-founders Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, Ben Mildenhall, and a16z's Martin Casado on Atlas, a world model for spatial intelligence: LLMs are built on next token prediction. Video models are built on next frame prediction. Atlas… |
EARLY: @munariai - 6 followers (Robotics) Munari just launched. Operator scoring for robot training data. On @frontrunvc, the story started 47 days before the X account went live. jul 16: a tracked account follows @rmn. flagged. aug 11:… |
Affirm CEO Max Levchin on why PayPal produced so many founders: "As we were interviewing certainly the early team and even the later team, we kept on selecting for entrepreneurs. One of the stock questions I would ask was, 'So what are you… |
World Labs co-founder Justin Johnson on how five photos from your phone could teach a robot to work in a room it has never seen: "I think there's a couple different tech trees that people are working on. One is this notion of fully… |
Physical AI Builders Newsletter Subscribe TwitterLinkedInFacebookYouTubeDiscord \\ \\ Sep 2, 2026\\ \\ •\\ \\ 3 min read\\ \\ Physical AI Newsletter is one year old, thank you!\\ \\ Now also on Linkedin, X.com\\ \\ \\ \\ David Cao \\ \\… |
Post Log in Sign up Post AquaForge\X on X: "Andreessen Horowitz expanded its fifth growth fund to $8.5B, adding $1.75B since January's $6.75B close. The raise lands days after a16z's new $1.1B "Machine Age" fund targeting AI hardware,… |
Gavin Baker says the future for the world's biggest companies is open models and private context: "I think the future is an ensemble of models. There's a Pareto curve. No one model is going to be the best at everything." "For the global… |
Fifteen years after "software is eating the world," Marc Andreessen's own firm just admitted atoms are eating software's margins. SUMMARY This is not an a16z story. a16z's $1.1B Machine Age Fund is simply the loudest confirmation yet of a… |
Some AI/semis notes from the past week: -> $NVDA huge Q2 revenue and profit growth. 2027+ is more growth even under a bottlenecked environment. Nvidia GOAT company? -> $NBIS first cloud customer for $NVDA Groq 3 LPX inference rack which… |
A16z just announced a $1.1bn fund to invest in US manufacturing & physical AI US must build its own hardware to compete with Chinese robotics. There is no way around. Having visited WRC, Robot Games and offices of robotics companies in… |
Error 401 (Bad Request)!!1 401. That’s an error. The server cannot process the request because it is malformed. It should not be retried. That’s all we know. Back Skip navigation Search Search with your voice Sign in Why Top Founders Are… |
SubscribeSign in Discover more from a16z Jobs New jobs every day. Subscribe By subscribing, you agree Substack's Terms of Use, and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy. Already have an account? Sign in Open… |
Skip to content The Fastest Path from Human Expertise to Deployable Robot Skills Get in contact \\ \\ The Challenges Facing Industrial Leaders Today Physical AI needs real-world training data: vision, sound, touch, force, spatial… |