How to Pitch a16z (Andreessen Horowitz)

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is one of the most visible funds in venture capital: more than $100 billion under management, hundreds of blog posts and podcasts, and a public thesis that runs from AI infrastructure to defense to bio. It has been more transparent about what it's looking for than almost any other top-tier fund.

And yet most founders who pitch them still miss the mark.

This guide explains what a16z actually evaluates, what their partners look for in a first meeting, and how to structure your approach.

What a16z Actually Is

a16z is organized by focus area, and its money is raised fund by fund. In January 2026 it raised more than $15 billion:

• Growth: $6.75B, for market leaders
• Apps: $1.7B
• Infrastructure: $1.7B, for the AI shift in computing
• American Dynamism: $1.18B, for aerospace, defense, public safety, education and manufacturing
• Bio + Health: $700M, from life sciences through care delivery
• Other venture strategies: $3B

The firm's focus areas are AI, American Dynamism, Bio + Health, Consumer, Enterprise, Fintech, Frontier (the former a16z Crypto, renamed in October 2026), Growth, Infrastructure and Speedrun. There is no separate seed fund: the core teams lead seed rounds themselves. Pitching the wrong team is one of the most common mistakes, so find the partner who covers your category before making contact.

a16z's Core Investment Thesis

a16z's best-known idea is Marc Andreessen's 2011 essay "Why Software Is Eating the World": software will eat every industry, and a16z invests in the companies doing the eating. The firm's about page still leads with it, and its 2026 funds put AI at the center: separate Apps and Infrastructure funds and a Machine Age Fund for AI compute and robotics.

Key things they evaluate:

1. Category creation. a16z explicitly prefers founders who are creating new categories, not competing in existing ones. They are looking for companies that will define a market, not win a share of one.

2. Technical depth. a16z's teams are built around technical categories such as infrastructure, AI and bio, and its partners expect a founding team that can speak to the technology with authority.

3. Network effects or data flywheel. a16z's Andrew Chen wrote the book on this, The Cold Start Problem: companies where scale makes the product better, which attracts more users, which makes it bigger again. This is the pattern they're chasing.

4. Speed of iteration. How fast is the team shipping? In early-stage companies, a16z partners look for evidence of relentless building — frequent releases, user feedback loops, rapid hypothesis testing.

5. The right "enemy." a16z appreciates founders who are contrarian in the right way — who can articulate clearly why conventional wisdom is wrong, and why the incumbent will lose. This doesn't mean arrogance; it means having a specific, reasoned view on how the market will evolve.

What a16z Says About Stage

a16z publishes no revenue or growth thresholds, and the ARR and retention bars attributed to it online are not from the firm. What it does say and show:

Seed: the core teams lead seed rounds (Inferact, QuiverAI, Mirendil and Neo in 2026), and speedrun says traction isn't required to apply.

Series A: recent leads include Ease ($41M), Convey ($38M), Town ($55M), Lightfield ($47M) and Highstock ($30M), all whole-round sizes.

Growth: the Growth team invests in market leaders and manages over $24 billion across five vintages.

Metrics any investor at this level will ask about (general guidance, not a16z thresholds):

• DAU/MAU ratio (for consumer) — above 30% signals habit
• Net Revenue Retention (for B2B) — above 120% is exceptional
• Payback period — under 12 months for SMB, under 18 months for enterprise
• Gross margin — above 70% for software, higher for AI-native

How a16z Sources Deals

speedrun is a16z's only open application: every application is read by a person, with a reply in 4-6 weeks. Outside speedrun there is no pitch form, so most deals arrive through people.

The paths in:

• Portfolio company referrals (their portfolio is enormous — someone at a16z almost certainly knows someone who knows you)
• Co-investor referrals from firms that share deals with a16z
• Their content — founders who build in public and get noticed by a16z partners
• speedrun: up to $1M ($500K on a SAFE upfront, up to $500K more in the next round) plus a 12-week residency in San Francisco

How to Structure Your Approach

1. Find the right partner. a16z does not publish a partner count; its team page lists about 99 people on the investment team, 32 of them general partners. Each focus-area page lists its investors with links to X and LinkedIn. Read their posts, listen to their podcast appearances, look at the companies they've led, and contact the person most likely to have conviction in your category.

2. Build in public before you fundraise. a16z partners write and post constantly, and they read what founders publish. If you're building something technically interesting, share it, and write about the insight you've discovered.

3. Leverage the portfolio. a16z's portfolio is large. Find founders in adjacent spaces, build genuine relationships, and ask for warm intros to the right partners.

4. Be concise and specific in your pitch. A useful frame (ours, not a published a16z template): the insight everyone else is missing, why now, and why you. Everything else is supporting evidence.

5. Don't oversell the market. a16z partners know that TAM slides are usually fiction. They're evaluating your thinking, not your slides. Show them you understand the dynamics of the market better than anyone — that's more compelling than a $10B market size number.

What Gets You Passed On

• Incremental improvement on an existing product. "We're 10x better than Salesforce" without a structural reason why is not enough. a16z is looking for companies that make the incumbent irrelevant, not marginally better.
• Missing technical depth. If no one on the founding team can speak to the technology with authority, a16z will have trouble getting conviction. They are not the right fund for non-technical founding teams in most cases.
• Vague market positioning. "We serve the enterprise" is not a market. "We serve head of security at Series B+ SaaS companies with 50–500 employees" is a market.
• Lack of urgency about why now. If you can't explain precisely what has changed in the last 12–24 months that makes your company possible, you haven't thought hard enough about timing.

The CTA That Works

Every a16z partner interaction should end with a clear next step you're proposing — not leaving it open-ended. "Can we schedule 30 minutes next week to show you the product?" is better than "let me know if you want to chat."

A second track: Pitch Protocol

Warm paths into a fund like a16z take time. Pitch Protocol is not a route into a16z; it is a second track you can run alongside your outreach. Applying is free, your own AI agent submits one application in about ten minutes with no web form, and the funds in our network whose thesis matches reach out to you directly. Apply to the First 100 Founders Cohort →