a16z-crypto
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Mariano Sorgente Wants You to Learn by Talking
After building blockchain infrastructure and investing at a16z crypto, the Stanford-trained engineer returned to the builder’s seat with ISSEN - a voice tutor born from years of learning Japanese the hard way.
The Houseparty Guy Got Burned Twice. Now He Wants You to Own the Group Chat.
Ben Rubin built Meerkat and Houseparty, watched both die, and decided the problem was ownership. Towns Labs is his answer: a messaging protocol where the community holds the keys, not the landlord.
Catena Labs
Catena Labs is a Boston-based fintech building what it calls the first AI-native financial institution - a regulated bank and governance platform designed for AI agents that autonomously send and receive money. Founded in 2025 by Circle co-founder and USDC co-creator Sean Neville, Catena pairs agent identity, deterministic spending policies, and audit trails with account management and stablecoin, card, ACH and wire payment rails. It also open-sourced the Agent Commerce Kit (ACK), a set of protocols for agent identity and payments built on W3C web standards.
Sean Neville
Sean Neville is the cofounder and CEO of Catena Labs, a Boston startup building what it calls the first fully regulated AI-native financial institution - a bank designed for autonomous AI agents to hold accounts, spend, get paid, and settle in stablecoins. He previously cofounded Circle in 2013 with Jeremy Allaire and served as its president and co-CEO, where he was the architect behind USDC. Catena raised an $18 million seed in May 2025 (led by a16z crypto) and a $30 million Series A in May 2026 (led by Acrew Capital and a16z crypto), and is applying for a national trust bank charter with the OCC.
Matthew Wang
Matthew Wang is the founder and CEO of OpenGradient, a New York company building a decentralized compute layer for verifiable and confidential AI. A former Two Sigma research engineer who cut his teeth on equity-options market-making infrastructure, he left quant finance in 2024 to chase a simpler question: can you prove that the AI answering you is the AI you think it is? OpenGradient runs models on-chain with cryptographic proofs and hardware enclaves, and has raised $9.5M led by a16z crypto, with backing from Coinbase Ventures, SV Angel, and angels including Balaji Srinivasan, Illia Polosukhin, and Sandeep Nailwal.
Halliday
Halliday is a San Francisco blockchain infrastructure company building the Agentic Workflow Protocol, a system that lets developers create onchain financial applications without writing smart contracts. Its flagship product, Halliday Payments, gives developers a single interface for fiat onramps, cross-chain bridging, swaps, and offramps. Backed by a16z crypto across both its seed and Series A rounds, Halliday has raised $26 million total and works with teams including DeFi Kingdoms, Avalanche, ApeCoin, Story Protocol, and Metis.
Markos Georghiades
Markos Georghiades is an Engineering Partner at Andreessen Horowitz's crypto division (a16z crypto), where he focuses on cryptography and core development of Jolt - a16z's open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). An undergraduate studying Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, he has co-authored multiple research breakthroughs: helping Jolt achieve a 6x throughput speedup (over 1 million RISC-V cycles/sec), enabling true zero-knowledge proofs via the NovaBlindFold technique, and implementing 64-bit proving without performance slowdown. His GitHub bio - 'sumcheck is love sumcheck is life' - says everything you need to know about where his obsessions lie.