Andreessen Horowitz has raised a whopping $15 billion in new funding. And $1.7 billion of that goes to the infrastructure team. The Infrastructure team is responsible for some of the company’s largest and most prominent AI investments, including Black Forest Labs, Cursor, OpenAI, Eleven Labs, Ideogram, Fal, and dozens of others.
Jennifer Lee, a16z general partner on the infrastructure team (who oversees investments like Eleven Labs and is valued at just $11 billion), has a clear theory about where the team intends to spend its latest funds.
These investors are not familiar with multi-billion dollar budgets. When the company raised $7.2 billion in 2024, the infrastructure team received $1.25 billion, more than any other vertical team at the time.
So what’s so exciting about infrastructure, especially in 2026? It covers everything from chip design to the software stacks used by developers. This is at the heart of AI development and is undergoing an unprecedented transformation process, both in how AI is used in these areas (AI coding) and in the AI available to developers (audio models in Celebrities, multimodal model marketplace in Fal).
That means Lee is at the forefront of what AI is now, where it’s going in 2026, and what it is and likely won’t be able to do. For example, she’s skeptical about some of the industry’s biggest assumptions, such as the idea that AI will soon replace human creativity.
Today on TechCrunch’s Equity Podcast, Venture & Startup Editor Julie Bolt spoke with Lee about what’s next in this AI supercycle, including the talent shortage hitting AI-native startups, why search infrastructure is more important than people think, and what companies are actually getting funding right now.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
When it comes to startups building AI stacks, Lee thinks there’s still a gap What sets the most successful AI portfolio companies apart How tools like voice AI are becoming more important (albeit still a little uncomfortable to witness) Which AI startups she’s still looking for and ready to fund
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