a16z Renames Crypto Fund to a16z Frontier

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has renamed its crypto fund from a16z Crypto to a16z Frontier, expanding its mandate to include AI technologies and other groundbreaking areas while maintaining investments in cryptocurrencies and advocating for sensible regulation of the crypto industry. This was announced by managing partner Chris Dixon on October 22, 2026, in a post on the a16z Frontier website. Co-founder Ben Horowitz noted that the fund raised over $15 billion earlier this year, but the size of the new fund has not been disclosed; the last known amount was $2.2 billion, announced in May. Dixon will lead the fund alongside Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and partners Eddy Lazzarin and Guy Wuollet.

Dixon says that blockchains have become part of the background of products people already use, including on Wall Street and in fintech. He emphasizes that a company should be defined not by the technologies it uses, but by what it does. In his view, cryptocurrency will remain important as it can provide new economic opportunities for programs operating autonomously. Dixon also reminded that projects like Coinbase, Solana, and Uniswap are in the fund's portfolio.

Dixon notes that the new wave of technologies includes autonomous machines and advancements in biology and medicine. He anticipates the emergence of "native use cases"—fundamentally new types of activities that did not exist before; early versions, he says, "will look strange and unserious, like toys and hobbies," before some of them grow into mainstream products. In his strategy, he focuses on long-term investments: when he joined a16z in 2013, he concentrated on similar investments, leading to investments in Oculus and drones Skydio and Zipline. Dixon sees cryptocurrency as a way to provide economic opportunities for AI agents, allowing them to transact with each other and create new markets, the unveiling of which may take years.