An artificial intelligence startup that helps developers write and debug code is now worth nearly as much as United Airlines. A two-month-old AI computer company raised a massive $475 million seed round, with plans to secure even more financing soon. And a platform for ranking AI models is now valued at nearly $2 billion, less than a year after it was spun out of an academic project.
The exuberance for all things AI has rapidly spilled over into the normally staid field of developer tools, benchmarking services and back-end systems — areas that most regular consumers will never encounter directly — becoming a focal point for a new wave of tech investment. And behind many of these companies, you’ll find a relatively nascent multibillion-dollar fund run by an unconventional team at Andreessen Horowitz.
The venture capital firm, which goes by the nickname a16z, set up a dedicated $1.25 billion war chest in 2024 for bets on AI infrastructure, a term that the fund defines more broadly than the costly chips and data centers that make AI run. This month, the firm said it would commit another $1.7 billion to the effort.
