a16z Partner - Consumer AI Investor
Justine Moore
She walked into pitch meetings before she could read. Now she writes the checks.
Partner, Andreessen Horowitz · @venturetwins
She walked into pitch meetings before she could read. Now she writes the checks.
Before she filed her first term sheet, before she could drive, before she'd ever heard the phrase "product-market fit" in a classroom - Justine Moore was already sitting in the meeting. Her mother, Darcy Moore, was a venture investor. Pitch days were family outings. That detail doesn't explain everything about Justine Moore, but it explains more than most.
She grew up in Portland, Oregon, a city not known for producing venture capitalists. No entrepreneurship classes in high school. No incubators, no demo days, no "startup ecosystem." And yet by the time she hit Stanford, she was already doing what instinct had prepared her for: finding founders worth backing, before anyone else thought to look.
At Stanford she didn't just study economics - she built an incubator. Cardinal Ventures, which she co-founded with her identical twin sister Olivia, became Stanford's only student-run startup accelerator. Two cohorts a year, ten to fifteen companies each, and mentorship that 120+ companies would eventually graduate from. They bootstrapped it from student government funds into $250K in annual sponsorships. No one asked them to do any of this.
"Creating Cardinal Ventures gave us opportunities to interact with some amazing entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and we found the experience of working with early stage companies to be really fun and fulfilling."- Justine Moore
She graduated with honors in Economics in 2016 and did the thing you do when you want to learn capital markets fast: went to Goldman Sachs. Private Equity Group Analyst. One year. Then Highland Capital Partners. Then, in September 2017, she joined CRV - Charles River Ventures - where she'd spend four years learning to spot the companies that would matter.
At 23, she was one of the youngest investors at a major VC firm. She worked under Saar Gur, the GP behind Bird, DoorDash, Patreon, and Dropbox. She focused on direct-to-consumer and consumer startups. And at the same time - at the exact same time - she launched the Accelerated newsletter with Olivia, initially targeting students and recent grads trying to break into VC.
The newsletter became its own deal-flow engine. Harper Wilde, a direct-to-consumer bra brand, was sourced directly from the Accelerated reader community. Justine helped lead the investment from inside CRV. That is what happens when your content and your conviction run on the same track.
Let's address it directly: Justine and Olivia Moore share more than DNA. They share a Twitter handle (@venturetwins). They share a newsletter. They shared an apartment in Menlo Park. And since April 2022, they have both been Partners at Andreessen Horowitz, sitting desks-apart from each other on the Consumer team.
It would be easy to make this the whole story. TechCrunch already did, in an October 2018 feature called "The Venture Twins." Fast Company revisited it years later. But the twin dynamic is a lens, not the picture. What the lens reveals: two people who have never stopped building together, who turn shared attention into a form of leverage that most investors never develop solo.
Their 3,000-member Slack community didn't just grow a newsletter. It became a map of who the next generation of VC-adjacent talent looked like - and where the next wave of consumer founders was coming from.
Justine left CRV in June 2021 for something unusual: she went operator. Canal, a platform helping direct-to-consumer brands expand into new sales channels, brought her on as Head of Go-To-Market. Canal's seed round was led by a16z and Forerunner Ventures - which means Justine spent roughly a year operating inside the exact kind of company she'd been backing from the outside.
In April 2022, a16z hired her as an Investment Partner. By 2023 she'd been promoted to Partner. Her focus: AI-native consumer products and generative media - which, as of 2024, is the most contested and most interesting bet in venture capital.
Her portfolio reads like a generative media wishlist assembled by someone who actually uses the products. ElevenLabs, the AI voice synthesis company that went from experiment to infrastructure in eighteen months. Krea, the AI creative interface for designers and musicians. Hedra, building AI character animation. Black Forest Labs, working on open visual foundation models. Viggle AI, which lets content creators maintain character and scene consistency across AI video - 2 million-plus users, $19M Series A led by a16z. Mirelo, building the audio foundation model layer for video, with a $45M seed co-led by a16z.
The thesis is specific enough to be useful: AI modalities converge on the creative act. Whatever goes in - image, text, audio, video - will eventually be routable to any output. The companies that own a layer in that stack early will own something durable. Justine isn't betting on the models themselves. She's betting on who makes them usable.
"It actually allows you to iterate and refine on said content like you have a person working alongside you - like a brainstorming partner who's also an editor who can make changes on the fly."- Justine Moore, on AI content tools
What separates Justine Moore from most AI investors is that she writes the primary sources. The "State of Consumer AI 2025" report, co-authored with Olivia, tracked adoption, retention, and paid growth across the major AI consumer products - and became one of the most-referenced documents in AI VC. Not because it made bold predictions, but because it measured things others were still guessing about.
She followed it with "The State of Generative Media 2026," mapping where the creative AI stack was consolidating and where it was still wide open. She wrote "AI Avatars Escape the Uncanny Valley," "From Prompt to Product: The Rise of AI-Powered Web App Builders," and "Export Your Brain: How I Uploaded Myself to AI" - a piece that requires exactly the kind of personal risk most VC writing carefully avoids.
She is also, per her own community recommendations, an active member of the LocalLlama, AI video, and ComfyUI communities - places where practitioners push models past their advertised limits. "They tend to be a curated group of folks," she said in one conversation. She's there not to scout, but because she's curious.
On open-source AI: "There's a really vibrant group of people all over the world who are taking these base models and fine tuning them...making very cool content." That's not a talking point. It's observation. The difference matters in someone whose job is to hear what founders are actually building versus what they say they're building.
On AI product bundling: "I think it'll probably happen eventually, some sort of AI bundle where you have broadly maybe the most popular products in every category that you can kind of tap into or use different credits for." This was a prediction from 2023 that was correct by 2025.
On the video model landscape, from a piece titled with admirable precision: "There Is No God Tier Video Model - But There Is Something Better." The argument: no single model wins everything, but the infrastructure layer beneath them will be where the durable value accretes. She invested accordingly.
And on breaking into VC, to students who ask (and many do, via Accelerated): "Start learning how to evaluate early stage companies, markets, and business models." Not "network more." Not "build your personal brand." The work, stated plainly.
AI speech synthesis and voice cloning that went from research experiment to global infrastructure. Backed before AI voice was a category.
Character and scene consistency for AI video creation. 2M+ content creators using it. "Helping drive a major shift in how creators approach creation."
Foundation model focused on the audio/sound layer of video. Solving the audio stack the way ElevenLabs solved voice.
AI video and character animation. Backed at Series A as the generative avatar space began to take shape.
AI creative interface for designers, musicians, and content creators. The tool that power users reach for when the mainstream tools fall short.
Open visual foundation models for developers. Betting on the open-source stack that powers the creators who power everyone else.
"It actually allows you to iterate and refine on said content like you have a person working alongside you - like a brainstorming partner who's also an editor who can make changes on the fly."
"There's a really vibrant group of people all over the world who are taking these base models and fine tuning them...making very cool content."
"Start learning how to evaluate early stage companies, markets, and business models."
"Viggle AI is helping drive a major shift in how content creators approach creation with character and scene consistency."
She grew up in Portland with no entrepreneurship classes. Zero. Started building anyway.
Her mother Darcy was a venture investor. Justine attended pitch meetings before kindergarten. She is, genetically and experientially, a second-generation VC.
@venturetwins: she and Olivia have never had separate professional social accounts. One handle. Two investors. Eight years running.
She left VC voluntarily - once - to go be an operator. The startup (Canal) was already backed by her future employer (a16z). This was not accidental.
The Accelerated newsletter's reader community directly generated a portfolio company. Harper Wilde came in through the newsletter, turned into a CRV investment. Content became deal flow.
She and Olivia shared an apartment in Menlo Park while both were at CRV. They now share desks at a16z. The operating model hasn't changed.