american-dynamism
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Mackenzie Burnett Took the Long Road to Make Accounting Feel Like Freedom
Before Ambrook became financial software for 8,000 independent businesses, its CEO spent years chasing a less fashionable question: what do farms, ranches and family companies actually need to stay independent?
Andreessen Horowitz
Andreessen Horowitz did not become a $100 billion venture firm by treating a check as the finished product. Its real wager is that founders will choose the investor with the strongest machine behind the money.
ZeroMark, Inc.
ZeroMark is a New York-based defense technology company building an AI targeting layer that turns ordinary infantry weapons into precision counter-drone systems. Its flagship Apex is a rifle-mounted, software-defined fire control system that uses electro-optical cameras, LiDAR and machine-vision ballistics to physically adjust a soldier's aim in real time, letting a dismounted operator hit small, fast-moving drones without specialist training. Founded in 2022 by former U.S. Navy servicemember and ex-MongoDB executive Joel Anderson, ZeroMark has raised roughly $7M in seed funding led by Ground Up Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, followed by a 2025 strategic round, and has demonstrated its system in a U.S. Marine Corps live-fire exercise.
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.'
Ulysses
Ulysses is a San Francisco ocean-robotics company building low-cost, modular autonomous underwater vehicles that replace multimillion-dollar ships and human divers. Founded in 2023, it started by using robots to replant declining seagrass meadows 100x faster than volunteer divers, then extended the same modular platform to offshore wind surveys, subsea infrastructure inspection, and maritime security. Its flagship Mako AUV dives 5,000 feet for up to 72 hours and starts at roughly $50,000 - about 50x cheaper than legacy systems - and the company raised a $38M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in April 2026.
Podium Automation
Podium Automation is a Brooklyn-based manufacturer rebuilding how industrial control panels are designed and built. Using a software-enabled configuration and fabrication process, Podium designs, wires, tests, and ships UL 508A and UL 698A control panels in under four weeks - roughly a third of the industry-standard lead time - with real-time transparency from purchase order to delivery. Founded in 2024 by Jamie Niu Serota (CEO) and Jacob Buser (CTO), the company aims to become the 'Protolabs of control panels,' serving customers from hardware scale-ups to Fortune 500 manufacturers.
Nikhil Reddy
Nikhil Reddy is the co-founder and CEO of Kaizen, a New York based civic technology company building modern, people-first software for America's public services. After stints engineering at Tesla, Anduril, and Archive Resale and a degree from UC Berkeley, he set out to replace the clunky legacy systems behind recreation sign-ups, permits, transit fares, DMVs, and licensing. Kaizen's platform now reaches more than 30 million residents across 17 states and 50-plus agencies, and has raised over $35 million from NEA, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism practice, and others. Outside the company he runs a YouTube channel with 36,000+ subscribers about life, technology, and ideas.
Turner Caldwell
Turner Caldwell is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mariana Minerals, a San Francisco-based startup rewriting the rulebook on how critical minerals are found, dug up, and refined. After nearly a decade ascending Tesla's battery supply chain from factory design to heading the metals and minerals team, Caldwell left to build Mariana in 2024. The company now operates Copper One in southeastern Utah - the world's first mine running autonomous haul trucks, robotic drills, and AI-driven refining under a single proprietary operating system called MarianaOS. Backed by a16z, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Khosla Ventures with $85M in Series A funding, Mariana targets 10 mineral projects in 10 years, compressing a timeline that traditionally stretches 15+ years for a single mine.
Will Bitsky
Will Bitsky is an Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) on the American Dynamism team, focused on investing in companies that support the national interest - spanning aerospace, defense, energy, public safety, education, housing, supply chain, and manufacturing. Before a16z, he was an investor at FirstMark Capital where he backed enterprise, fintech, and consumer internet companies at seed and Series A stages. He got his start in TMT investment banking at Goldman Sachs and holds a B.A. from Cornell University. His current investment thesis centers on a conviction that data - not compute - determines who wins in the physical AI era.
Andy McCall
Andy McCall is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms, where he focuses on the American Dynamism and AI Apps funds. A 25-year veteran of technology sales and go-to-market strategy, McCall built and scaled two legendary companies - first growing Meraki from single-digit millions to hundreds of millions in revenue before Cisco's 2012 acquisition, then taking Samsara from startup to a billion-dollar-ARR public company as CRO. He joined a16z in November 2024, bringing rare operational credibility as an investor who can tell founders 'Been there, done that' on the CRO journey.
Brian Roberts
Brian Roberts is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he works across the American Dynamism and AI Apps funds. Known as BK to those in the know, Roberts is a serial CFO turned investor who took Lyft public at a $24 billion valuation, helped Splunk get acquired by Cisco for $28 billion, and was OpenSea's first CFO during the NFT boom. With 30+ years spanning investment banking at Evercore, corporate development at Microsoft and Walmart, and C-suite finance roles at some of tech's most pivotal companies, he joined a16z in October 2024 to bring an operator's lens to early and growth-stage investments in enterprise software, fintech, and America's strategic tech infrastructure.
Christian Keil
Christian Keil is an Investing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz on the American Dynamism team, backing startups that build for the national interest - from aerospace to defense to infrastructure. Before turning investor, he spent seven years as a top executive at Astranis, the satellite company he helped scale from a 50-person R&D shop to a 500-person aerospace-grade factory with over $1 billion in sales. He may be the only venture capitalist who has personally bought a dedicated Falcon 9 rocket. A proud Midwesterner who moved to Silicon Valley in 2017, Keil writes, podcasts, and thinks deeply about what it means to build things that matter for America.
Erin Price-Wright
Erin Price-Wright is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads the firm's American Dynamism practice alongside Katherine Boyle. Focused on AI for the physical world, she backs early-stage companies in robotics, energy, defense, manufacturing, and critical minerals. A Stanford and Oxford-trained mathematician who grew up on a reservation in Arizona, she spent most of her pre-investing career at Palantir - starting as a Forward Deployed Engineer and rising to Head of Product for its data analytics platform - before becoming a partner at Index Ventures. She joined a16z in April 2024 to focus on the energy and industrial AI side of America's technological renaissance.
Mario Linares
Mario Linares is a Partner on the Executive Talent team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he works directly with seed-stage founders across Enterprise, Fintech, Consumer, and American Dynamism portfolio companies to recruit and place senior leadership. A former professional chef turned Silicon Valley recruiter, Linares spent years inside the talent organizations of Cisco, Nicira, VMware, and Google/YouTube before joining a16z - where he now brings the same precision he once applied to perfecting a dish to the art of matching world-class executives with breakout companies.
Zabie Elmgren
Zabie Elmgren is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) on the American Dynamism investing team, where she backs founders building companies at the intersection of AI and the physical world - from industrial infrastructure to defense technology. Before a16z, she was a Partner at Index Ventures leading early-stage B2B and B2C software investments. Her career started unconventionally: as part of the founding team at Human Capital, she helped grow a recruiting firm into a $600M+ venture fund while studying computer science at Harvard, personally placing early engineers at Brex, Robinhood, Snowflake, and Nuro.
Marcus Zimmerman
Marcus Zimmerman dropped out of Stanford two quarters shy of graduation to co-found Candor (YC W25), an AI platform that helps defense, biotech, and energy startups win U.S. government funding. Before building Candor, he led Stanford's DEFCON Tech and National Security Network, served as a Defense Innovation Scholar at Stanford's Gordian Knot Center, and sourced deals as a Venture Partner at GoAhead Ventures in Menlo Park. He sits at the rare intersection of venture capital, national security, and applied AI.
Katherine Boyle
Katherine Boyle is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads the American Dynamism practice - a $1.1B+ fund focused on startups that serve the national interest. A former Washington Post journalist turned VC, she champions defense tech, manufacturing, aerospace, and critical infrastructure companies. She sits on the boards of Anduril Industries and The Free Press, and is widely regarded as one of tech's most important bridges between Silicon Valley and Washington.