a16z
(157)
David Booth and the business of being in the right room
From a teenage iPod venture in New Zealand to On Deck and a16z, David Booth keeps returning to one question: who could build something together, if only they met?
Rohan Chopra
Rohan Chopra is the co-founder and CEO of Convey, a San Francisco enterprise AI company that lets non-technical operators build and manage autonomous 'digital teammates' to run repetitive business operations. An early DoorDash engineer who spent roughly eight years there building the logistics and dispatch systems behind its delivery network, Chopra started Convey in 2024 with childhood friends Diego Canales and Will Harvey. In June 2026 the company raised a $38 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Khosla Ventures and Pear VC participating, after its platform logged more than one million hours of automated work for customers including NBCUniversal, Samsara, TelevisaUnivision, Unity, Faire and ChargePoint.
Steijn Pelle
Steijn Pelle is the co-founder and CEO of Lassie, a San Francisco AI company building an autonomous back-office worker that runs the financial admin of independent businesses, starting with dental and medical practices. A Dutch transplant to Silicon Valley with roughly 15 years in startups, he cut his teeth on consumer growth at HealthTap, Coinbase and Robinhood before founding Lassie in 2021. In June 2026 the company raised a $35M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing total funding to $47M, while operating in more than 700 practices across 49 states.
Davide Asnaghi
Davide Asnaghi is the co-founder and CEO of Diode Computers, a startup rebuilding how printed circuit boards are designed and manufactured. An Italian-born engineer trained at UC Berkeley, he spent years building hardware at Apple's Special Projects Group and medical-device companies before starting Diode to replace legacy EDA tools with open-source, AI-friendly software: a Python design language backed by a Rust compiler that turns requirements into manufacturable circuit boards in a fraction of the usual time. Diode raised an $11.4M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and partners with Anthropic to make Claude a more capable electrical engineer.
Jamie Davidson
Jamie Davidson is the co-founder and CEO of Vitally, a New York-based customer success platform used by more than 600 B2B software teams including Segment, Productboard, and Calendly. A two-time CTO with a computer science background, he shifted from engineering into customer-facing work at his previous startup Pathgather, concluded that customer success software was overdue for a rebuild, and launched Vitally in 2017. He has raised roughly $39 million across seed, a $9.2M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and a $30M Series B, positioning Vitally around analytics, automation, and workflow tooling for customer success teams.
Joel Anderson
Joel Anderson is the founder and CEO of ZeroMark, a New York defense-technology startup building an AI-and-robotics fire control system that turns ordinary infantry rifles into auto-aiming counter-drone weapons. A U.S. Navy veteran who went on to help scale MongoDB from a small team to a public company as a senior technical and security leader, Anderson founded ZeroMark in 2022 after an 'epiphany' driving his Tesla to a shooting range: consumer machines could aim and track better than a soldier could. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism fund and Ground Up Ventures, ZeroMark markets what it calls a 'handheld Iron Dome' - a motorized buttstock and sensor pod that make hitting a small drone at 200 yards, in Anderson's words, 'as easy as hitting a 60-foot-diameter circle.'
Jonathan Swerdlin
Jonathan Swerdlin is the co-founder and CEO of Function Health, an Austin-based membership platform that gives consumers direct access to comprehensive lab testing and AI-generated reports. A serial entrepreneur and investor who previously built and chaired Thinx and founded the video app Portal, Swerdlin has advised or backed more than 100 companies through his firm Wisdom VC. Since launching Function in 2023, he has grown it to hundreds of thousands of paying members, raised a $298M Series B at a $2.5B valuation, and drawn backing from Andreessen Horowitz and celebrity investors including Matt Damon and Kevin Hart. Goldman Sachs named him one of its Most Exceptional Entrepreneurs of 2025.
Joseph Connor
Joseph Connor is the founder and CEO of Odyssey, a New York based technology company that helps states run school choice programs like education savings accounts (ESAs). A former classroom teacher at KIPP and Rocketship who went on to Notre Dame Law School and worked on the landmark Espinoza v. Montana Supreme Court case, Connor built Odyssey to make public education dollars easy for families to access. The platform has helped more than 140,000 students across seven states tap into over $375 million in state funding, and raised a $10 million Series A in 2024 led by Tusk Venture Partners with backing from a16z's Katherine Boyle.
Matt Calvano
Matt Calvano is co-founder and CEO of Adaptive, a New York-based AI-native accounting and financial management platform built for the construction industry. A former real estate private equity investor and Morgan Stanley banker turned Stanford MBA, he launched Adaptive in 2022 with two Stanford classmates and has raised $26.4M from Emergence Capital and Andreessen Horowitz to attack the paperwork chaos and cash leakage inside the $2 trillion construction sector.
Minna Song
Minna Song is the cofounder and CEO of EliseAI, a New York company that builds conversational AI for property managers and, more recently, healthcare providers. She started the company in 2017 after taking a front-desk job at a real estate firm to see the workflow up close, and in 2025 raised a $250 million Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.2 billion valuation. EliseAI now serves roughly 70-75% of the fifty largest U.S. rental operators and crossed $200 million in annual recurring revenue.
Tim Lupo
Tim Lupo is the co-founder and CEO of Deeptune, a New York startup that builds high-fidelity reinforcement learning environments - which he calls 'training gyms' or 'flight simulators' - where AI agents learn to do real digital work across enterprise software like Salesforce and Slack. In early 2026 the company raised a $43M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. Deeptune started life as an AI video-dubbing tool that landed Lupo and co-founder Lukas Schmit on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, then pivoted to become RL infrastructure for frontier AI labs. A former founding engineer at Hebbia and a full-merit USC scholar, Lupo pitches the roughly 20-person, in-person team as one of the only early-stage places in New York to work on AGI.
Kevin Tian
Kevin Tian is the co-founder and CEO of Doppel, an AI-native social engineering defense platform that scans the internet for impersonation campaigns and shuts them down automatically. A Georgetown grad who built dispatch systems and flying-car software at Uber and Lyft, he started Doppel in 2022 after spotting social engineering becoming the top source of breaches and cyber-insurance claims. Doppel raised a $70M Series C in November 2025 at a $600M+ valuation, backed by Bessemer, a16z, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, and a bench of WNBA stars.
George Strompolos
George Strompolos is the co-founder and CEO of Promise, a Venice, California studio built from the ground up for the generative AI era to produce films and series. He co-created the YouTube Partner Program in 2007, founded the creator-economy giant Fullscreen in 2011, and sold it to AT&T/WarnerMedia in 2018 in a reported $845M deal. At Promise he is building MUSE, a production workflow platform that threads generative AI tools through the filmmaking process, backed by Peter Chernin's North Road, Andreessen Horowitz, and Google's AI Futures Fund.
Nicolas Abad
Nicolas Abad is the co-founder and CEO of Telepatia, a Latin American healthtech company building AI healthcare workers - starting with an 'AI Doctor' that transcribes consultations, reviews records, flags drug interactions, and surfaces clinical guidance in real time. Named after his late father's nickname, the company grew from a Stanford MBA side obsession to a venture backed by Andreessen Horowitz, reaching more than 14 million patients across five countries inside its first year. Abad's stated ambition is audacious to the point of comedy: win Latin America's first Nobel Prize in Medicine since 1984 by turning healthcare from scarcity into abundance.
Chris Ellis
Chris Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Thatch, a San Francisco healthtech-meets-fintech company that lets employers hand workers tax-free dollars to buy and manage their own health benefits through ICHRA. A former cancer researcher who started at MIT and studied at Duke, Ellis lost his father to cancer at age six, an experience that shaped both his skepticism of the healthcare system and his drive to rebuild how it is paid for. Founded in 2021 with Adam Stevenson, Thatch now serves more than 1,000 companies and raised a $40M Series B led by Index Ventures in April 2025, on top of an earlier $38M Series A, with backing from a16z, General Catalyst, and Google Ventures.
Griffin Dunaif
Griffin Dunaif is the co-founder and CEO of Halliday, a San Francisco blockchain startup building the first agentic workflow protocol - infrastructure that lets developers ship onchain applications without writing smart contracts. A Stanford computer science graduate (2023) who left to build, Dunaif started Halliday in 2022 as a buy-now-pay-later tool for gamers, then pivoted to the broader bet that workflows, not contracts, are how AI agents will safely operate onchain. The company has raised $26 million total, including a $20 million Series A led by a16z crypto in March 2025.
Gregg Mojica
Gregg Mojica is the founder and CEO of Kinter.ai, the AI-accounting company that grew out of Alloy Automation, the integration platform he co-founded with Sara Du in 2019 (YC W20). He started coding at 12, shipped three apps before he turned 18, got into Cornell and skipped it to build payments infrastructure at First Data/Fiserv, then helped build Alloy into the connective tissue for thousands of ecommerce and AI-agent workflows backed by a16z and Bain Capital Ventures. Today his AI Accountants close the books for enterprises including Amazon, Mastercard and UPS.
Michael Wang
Michael Wang is the cofounder and CEO of Cider, a Gen Z fashion brand he started in September 2020 during the pandemic and grew into a billion-dollar, social-first company selling trend-driven womenswear to more than 100 countries. A UC Berkeley applied-math graduate and former KKR and IDG Capital investor, Wang built and ran market strategy for YCloset (often called the Rent the Runway of China) before founding Cider. He installs his own software inside factories, releases new styles daily on a near-zero-inventory model, and treats Instagram and TikTok as the storefront. He was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2018.
Nan Wang
Nan Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Sleeper, the fantasy sports platform built like a group chat that grew to millions of daily users almost entirely by word of mouth. He left a private equity career in Hong Kong to build a sports product that is social at its core, turning a 20-year fantasy league among childhood friends into a company backed by a16z, General Catalyst, and athletes like Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson. Under Wang, Sleeper expanded from fantasy football into the NBA and fantasy esports, drawing an unusually large share of women and casual fans to a category long dominated by ESPN and Yahoo.
Alec Nielsen
Alec Nielsen is the co-founder and CEO of Asimov, a Boston synthetic biology company building computer-aided design tools for living cells. His MIT PhD work in the Voigt Lab produced Cello, a programming language that compiles plain-text logic instructions into thousands of DNA letters. Asimov turned that academic breakthrough into a commercial platform for designing and manufacturing biologics, cell therapies, and gene therapies, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, DARPA, and a $175M Series B led by CPP Investments.
Andrew Wang
Andrew Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Valon, a New York fintech that rebuilt the plumbing of mortgage servicing from scratch. An engineer-turned-private-credit-investor who left a principal seat at Soros Fund Management, he set out to fix an industry still running on software from the 1960s-80s. Valon became the first new servicer to win Fannie Mae licensing on a proprietary system, now runs tens of billions in mortgages on its platform ValonOS, and raised a $100M Series C in October 2024 led by WestCap with Andreessen Horowitz.
Cheryl Liu
Cheryl Liu is the founder and CEO of Raspberry AI, a New York generative-AI platform that turns fashion designers' sketches into retail-ready, photo-realistic images, technical drawings, and CAD files in minutes instead of months. A former KKR retail private-equity analyst who later built product and machine-learning teams at Amazon and DoorDash, she spotted the opening for fashion-specific image generation the moment DALL-E and Stable Diffusion arrived in late 2022. Raspberry AI now serves brands including Under Armour, J.Crew, Tapestry, and Li & Fung, raised a $24M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and was named one of CB Insights' 2026 AI 100 as the only creative-AI application on the list.
Dylan Parker
Dylan Parker is the co-founder and CEO of Moment, the AI operating system for investment management. A former Citadel Securities and Jane Street fixed income quant, he and two Harvard friends set out to drag the $150-trillion bond market out of spreadsheets and chat threads. In under four years Moment went from $300 billion to over $10 trillion in client assets monitored and raised $134 million across three rounds, counting Edward Jones, LPL Financial, and Hightower Advisors as customers.
George Sivulka
George Sivulka is the founder and CEO of Hebbia, the AI platform that turns piles of unstructured documents into answers for asset managers, banks, and law firms. He cold-called NASA as a teenager, finished a Stanford math degree in 2.5 years, then walked away from a fully funded PhD to build software that lets AI agents do the multi-step grunt work of professional analysis. By 2024 Hebbia had raised $130M at a $700M valuation on $13M of profitable revenue, with Peter Thiel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and Google Ventures behind it.
Peter Zhou
Peter Zhou is the co-founder and CEO of Rutter, the New York-based unified API that connects business financial data across accounting systems, commerce platforms, payment processors, and ad networks. Often described as the 'Plaid for commerce,' Rutter lets B2B fintech companies plug into QuickBooks, Shopify, Amazon, Stripe and dozens more through a single consistent schema. A Yale-trained computer scientist and Y Combinator alum, Zhou and co-founder Eric Yu pivoted through years of failed startups before landing on Rutter, which raised a $27M Series A led by a16z in 2022.
Sam Gerstenzang
Sam Gerstenzang is the co-founder and CEO of Meadow Memorials, a software-enabled funeral and cremation company he started in 2024 after arranging his grandfather's funeral and finding the experience opaque, overwhelming and impersonal. Meadow runs funerals at chapels, beaches, theaters and restaurants instead of traditional funeral homes, with transparent pricing and what Sam calls 'unreasonable hospitality.' Before Meadow he led consumer payments product at Stripe, invested at Andreessen Horowitz, incubated companies at Sidewalk Labs, was early at Imgur, and co-founded Umbrella (acquired by IAC/Angi) and the medspa platform Moxie. In March 2026 Meadow raised a $9M Series A led by Lachy Groom and Haystack.
Vijay Kedar
Vijay Kedar is the co-founder and CEO of Tomorrow Health, a New York healthtech company rebuilding how home-based care is ordered, delivered, and paid for. A Goldman Sachs private-equity alum and early Oscar Health operator who launched its Texas market, Kedar started Tomorrow Health after spending six frustrating weeks trying to coordinate home medical equipment for his mother during her cancer treatment. The company has raised roughly $92.5M from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, BOND, Obvious Ventures, and Sound Ventures, partnering with health plans and providers to connect a fragmented home-care supply chain.
Fangjin Yang
Fangjin Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Imply, the commercial company behind Apache Druid - the real-time analytics database he helped create at Metamarkets in 2011. He turned a side project born from the millisecond demands of programmatic advertising into a $1.1B unicorn, raising $215M along the way. An original Druid committer and University of Waterloo-trained engineer, Yang now leads Imply's mission to power interactive, high-concurrency analytics applications at scale - with customers including Netflix, Atlassian, Salesforce, and Confluent.
Mahmoud Ghulman
Mahmoud Ghulman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nash, a San Francisco-based AI logistics platform that serves as the delivery infrastructure layer for commerce - connecting businesses like Walmart, 7-Eleven, and thousands of restaurants to hundreds of delivery providers through a single API. A physics graduate from MIT, Ghulman spent nearly a decade building gig-economy and AI businesses before co-founding Nash in 2021 with high school friend Aziz Alghunaim. The company has raised $29.1M in total funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator, and is pioneering agentic AI for last-mile delivery orchestration at enterprise scale.
Nikhil Buduma
Nikhil Buduma is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ambience Healthcare, an ambient AI platform that automates clinical documentation, coding, and revenue integrity for health systems. A two-time International Biology Olympiad gold medalist, MIT-educated computer scientist, and author of O'Reilly's 'Fundamentals of Deep Learning,' Buduma built Ambience from the ground up - first by running a medical practice, then by creating the AI platform his clinicians needed. The company has raised $343M total, reached a $1.25B valuation after a $243M Series C in 2025, and built a platform that supports 100+ medical specialties across outpatient, emergency, and inpatient settings.