Andreessen Horowitz is renaming a16z Crypto to a16z Frontier and expanding the scope of its new fund beyond crypto startups, managing partner Chris Dixon announced on October 22, 2026, in a post on the a16z Frontier site. The fund’s remit now covers what the firm calls frontier startups, Dixon said, defined in the post as companies working on technologies and markets that could take years to develop.
Dixon described the change as an expansion. The firm will go on investing in crypto and related ventures, he wrote, and will continue advocating for what he called sensible crypto regulation. He said he will lead the fund alongside the firm’s founders, Marc and Ben, and general partners Eddy Lazzarin and Guy Wuollet. The post said the firm’s operating teams will continue working with existing and future portfolio companies on regulation, go-to-market, talent, marketing, and technical research and development.
From the 2018 Crypto Fund to Fund 5
Andreessen Horowitz launched a16z crypto on June 25, 2018, describing it as a $350 million venture fund that would invest in crypto companies and protocols. The launch announcement described a fund structured to hold investments for more than ten years and to keep investing steadily regardless of market conditions, backing projects at every stage, from seed-stage efforts that had yet to launch to developed networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. It said the fund could use traditional instruments like equity and convertible notes alongside direct purchases of coins and tokens, that portfolio companies would have access to the same 80-plus-person operating teams as the firm’s other investments, and that the fund would concentrate on non-speculative use cases.
On May 5, 2026, the team announced Crypto Fund 5, a $2.2 billion fund backing founders it described as turning new infrastructure into products people use every day. The Fund 5 post was written by Dixon alongside Ali Yahya, Guy Wuollet, and Eddy Lazzarin, all three identified in it as general partners at a16z crypto; it pointed to stablecoin usage that it said had kept climbing through market downturns and cited the GENIUS Act as an example of what it called thoughtful policy: clear definitions, strong safeguards, and room for builders.
In the October announcement, Dixon wrote that he made long-horizon investments a focus after joining the firm in 2013. One theme was new computing devices: smartphones had made cameras, sensors, and chips better and cheaper, enabling products such as drones, AR and VR headsets, and wearables, and that theme led to investments in Oculus and the drone startups Skydio and Zipline, he said. The other was crypto, which he viewed as a wave built on social media and the open source movement; he said it guided the firm’s Coinbase investment, the creation of its crypto funds, and later investments in projects including Solana and Uniswap.
Explaining the new name, Dixon wrote that crypto was a world of its own when the firm began investing, but that wider blockchain use has blurred the lines, with Wall Street and fintech companies now routinely launching products built on blockchains. “The label matters less now,” he wrote, adding that it makes more sense to define companies by what they do than by the technologies they use.
The Frontier Thesis
Dixon wrote that the industry is in the middle of another major technology wave centered on AI, and that while the buildout of AI models and infrastructure will continue, the technology is already advanced enough to support a new generation of products and services. He said the firm is especially interested in the products and markets these advances will enable, including ones that do not fit existing categories.
Foremost among them, he wrote, are native use cases: activities that were not previously possible. Early applications of a new technology tend to improve on old activities, he said, and AI to date has mostly improved existing work such as coding and other knowledge tasks in speed, quality, and cost. Many early experiments in native uses will look like amusements rather than serious products, he wrote, but some will grow into mainstream ones, and the way to tell the difference lies in their potential rates of improvement — whether marginal growth can be bent into an exponential curve.
Devices, Networks, and Blockchains
Dixon said he expects a proliferation of new devices, including autonomous machines that can sense their surroundings, reason, and take physical action, and others drawing on advances in biology and medicine. He also expects more full-stack startups combining software, hardware, and services in one company, and wrote that the idea of what it means to be a founder may change as AI agents become more autonomous.
He wrote that AI will also give rise to new kinds of networks, ones that connect people with intelligent agents capable of learning, coordinating, producing, and transacting. Because the large-scale networks in use today were built for humans, he said, networks built for machines will look very different; many will start as tools for a single user and grow into networks for many, and he described the potential of what he called machine-age networks as enormous and barely explored.
Blockchains will play a significant role in that shift, Dixon wrote. Crypto has put programmable payment rails on the internet that move money quickly and cheaply anywhere in the world, he said, and stablecoins are quickly becoming a standard tool for fintechs and established institutions. Because blockchains are programmable, he wrote, both centralized and decentralized financial services can be built on top of them, and crypto can give new networks native economic capabilities, enable machine-to-machine transactions, and help new networks bootstrap themselves.
“These are examples, not boundaries,” Dixon wrote, noting that few predicted the companies that came to define earlier waves and that the firm expects founders to surprise it. He said the firm believes some of the most important technology waves are yet to come, and he invited founders working on what they believe comes next to get in touch.
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