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.
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.
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.