Giant venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has finalized its second crypto asset fund which is valued at over half a billion dollars.
Established in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in 2009, the VC firm confirmed the news on April 30, 2020. The Menlo Park, California-based company stated that the $515 million crypto and blockchain-focused fund would primarily invest in decentralized finance (DeFi), payments, and Web 3.0 technologies.
Chris Dixon and former US federal prosecutor Katie Haun, who are co-leading and managing the fund, remarked:
“Payment blockchains could end up doing to banks what email did to the post office and what VoIP [Voice over Internet Protocol] services did to long-distance carriers.”
Commenting on the potential of the nascent DeFi ecosystem, they noted that decentralized lending protocols could fundamentally transform the global lending, derivatives, insurance, and trading sectors.
Dixon and Haun added:
“We think the next wave of internet business models will come from crypto.”
Andreessen Horowitz’s “Crypto Fund II” has been announced shortly after reports had surfaced, claiming that the VC company was in the process of raising $450 million for its second cryptocurrency fund.
A16z secured $350 million in capital for its first digital asset fund back in 2018. The firm has made strategic investments in San Francisco-based crypto exchange Coinbase, the Facebook-led Libra project, and leading DeFi platforms Maker and Compound.
Andreessen Horowitz regularly invests in early-stage and established growth firms. The company’s investments cover the mobile, gaming, social, digital commerce, education and enterprise IT (cloud computing, security, and software as a service) sectors.
Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures, who are Libra Association members, and the Grameen Foundation are reportedly backing the Celo Foundation, a non-profit that signed up 50 organizations to its “Alliance for Prosperity ” program – which aims to promote financial inclusion by leveraging blockchain tech.