Ambience Healthcare builds an ambient AI platform for clinicians - an AI medical scribe and coding assistant that listens to patient visits, drafts structured notes in seconds, and pushes compliant ICD-10/CPT coding back into Epic, Cerner, and athenahealth. It is used by Cleveland Clinic, UCSF Health, Houston Methodist, Memorial Hermann and dozens of other systems.
Advith Chelikani is the co-founder and CTO of Pylon, an AI-powered B2B customer support platform based in San Francisco. A Caltech computer science graduate and former Samsara engineer, Advith co-founded Pylon in November 2022 alongside Marty Kausas and Robert Eng. In under three years, the company raised $51.2M in total funding - including a $17M Series A from a16z in 2024 and a $31M Series B in 2025 - scaled to 750+ customers, and grew revenue 5x year-over-year for two consecutive years. Pylon replaces legacy platforms like Zendesk by meeting enterprise support teams where their customers already are: Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord.
Daniel Yousefian is a co-founder of Clubhouse, the voice-based social networking platform that captured the world's attention during the pandemic. Built under Alpha Exploration Co. and backed by $112M from Andreessen Horowitz, Clubhouse pioneered drop-in audio rooms before boldly pivoting toward intimate friend-to-friend voice messaging - complete with AI-powered custom voice cloning. Based in Yerevan, Armenia, Yousefian is part of the founding trio alongside CEO Paul Davison and co-founder Rohan Seth.
Haya Odeh is the co-founder and VP of Design at Replit, the cloud-based AI-powered software development platform with over 50 million users. Born in Abu Dhabi and raised in Jordan, she studied graphic design and fine arts before building the visual identity and product design of one of the world's fastest-growing developer communities. She pioneered Replit's design shift from developer-only tooling to accessible, no-code software creation - a single word change from 'deploy' to 'publish' dramatically increased app creation rates. Alongside her husband and co-founder Amjad Masad, she navigated four Y Combinator rejections before being accepted in 2018 and raising over $872 million in total funding.
Mahmoud Abdelkader is the Egyptian-American co-founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based data security platform that raised $105 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Visa. Born near the Suez Canal and raised in Brooklyn, he built high-frequency trading systems at Wachovia, was employee #4 at Milo.com before its $75M eBay acquisition, then co-founded Balanced Payments through Y Combinator (W11) before founding VGS in 2016. VGS pioneered the 'Zero Data' category of data security as a service, serving 700+ customers including Fortune 100 companies. He stepped down as CEO in late 2022 and now invests in fintech companies including Ramp, Vercel, Alloy, Mercury, and Stytch while experimenting with AI.
Marshall Jones is the CTO and Co-Founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based fintech company that has become the world's leader in payment tokenization with over 5 billion tokens stored. He co-founded VGS in 2015 alongside Mahmoud Abdelkader after building PCI-compliant payment vaults at Balanced Payments (later acquired by Stripe). Under his technical leadership, VGS has raised over $104 million in funding from top investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Vertex Ventures, serving Fortune 500 companies, merchants, fintechs, and banks globally.
Maxwell Blumenfeld is the Co-Founder, COO, and Head of R&D at SentiLink, a San Francisco-based identity verification and fraud prevention company he co-founded in 2017 with Naftali Harris after both worked as risk leaders at Affirm. Discovering that synthetic identities with real 750+ credit scores were slipping through the financial system, they built SentiLink into a platform now serving 300+ financial institutions - including three of the top 10 US banks - having verified several hundred million applications. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2020, Blumenfeld holds a mathematics and economics degree from the University of Chicago and operates from Austin, Texas.
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.
Nikola (Nik) Mijic is the co-founder and CEO of Matik, a San Francisco-based SaaS platform that automates the creation of personalized, data-driven presentations and documents. Born in Sarajevo, Bosnia, he fled the Bosnian civil war as a toddler - spending years in Hungary and Germany before his family settled in Salt Lake City, Utah. After studying accounting and economics at Westminster College, he moved into customer success technology, building internal presentation tools at LinkedIn before co-founding Matik in 2019 with engineer Zak Stein. Matik has raised $26.1M from Menlo Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, grown to over $10.7M ARR, and counts Asana, SalesLoft, Greenhouse, and Glassdoor among its customers.
Sophie Novati is the CEO and co-founder of Formation, an A16Z-backed engineering fellowship that helps underrepresented software engineers break into top-tier tech companies. A Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate who rose to staff engineer at Facebook and Nextdoor, she founded Formation in 2019 after recognizing that talented engineers from non-traditional backgrounds were being systematically excluded from elite tech roles. Formation pairs adaptive AI-driven learning with mentorship from senior engineers, and its graduates have landed roles at Meta, Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Dropbox, with an average first-year compensation increase of over $100,000. The company has raised $9 million in funding and Novati credits a 2am chess game with Mark Zuckerberg as one early spark for thinking about business models.
Material Security is a San Francisco cloud workspace security company that protects email, files, and accounts inside Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Founded in 2017 by three ex-Dropbox engineers, it assumes attackers will eventually get in - and locks down the sensitive data they came for, instead of stacking yet another perimeter.
Mem is an AI-native notes app that doubles as a thought partner. Founded by Kevin Moody and Dennis Xu, the company is rebuilding personal knowledge management around a simple bet: you should never have to organize information again. Backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, Mem captures voice, web, and email inputs and resurfaces them at exactly the right moment.
Anirudh Joshi is the co-founder and CEO of Valar Labs, a Palo Alto-based AI oncology company building tools that let doctors predict whether a specific cancer treatment will work before a patient wastes months on the wrong one. A biomedical engineer trained at Georgia Tech and Stanford, he previously built AI at Microsoft, PathAI, and Curai before co-founding Valar in 2021 with teammates from Stanford's AI in Medicine group. Valar raised $26M total, landing a $22M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz and DCVC in 2024, and its flagship test Vesta — predicting BCG therapy response in bladder cancer — is now live at 20 U.S. hospitals. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare 2025.
Peter Doyle is Co-Founder and CEO of Treeline, a San Francisco-based startup reimagining corporate IT operations through AI and software automation. A decade-long venture capitalist at Accel who backed companies like PagerDuty, Heptio, and ServiceChannel, Doyle made the leap to operator in 2024. Treeline - backed by $25 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz - is building what Doyle calls a 'modern IT operating system': an AI-first alternative to the legacy managed service provider model that still powers most of the world's corporate IT infrastructure.
Scott Clark is the Co-founder and CEO of Distributional, an enterprise AI testing platform that helps companies identify behavioral drift and unknown failures in AI systems. A triple-degree graduate of Oregon State University with a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell, he co-founded and sold SigOpt (a Bayesian optimization platform backed by Y Combinator and a16z) to Intel in 2020, then led 200 engineers as VP & GM of AI/HPC Supercomputing at Intel before founding Distributional in September 2023. The company raised $30M in under a year, including a $19M Series A led by Two Sigma Ventures in October 2024.
Anurupa Ganguly is the founder and CEO of Prisms, a spatial learning platform that uses virtual reality to teach core math and science to middle and high school students. A former math and physics teacher with degrees from MIT and Boston University, she built Prisms after a decade-plus in education leadership at Boston Public Schools and the NYC Department of Education. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz with $18.4M raised, Prisms now reaches 300,000+ students across 300+ school districts in 35 states, delivering measurable gains in algebra and science comprehension through embodied, problem-driven VR experiences.
Arvind Parthasarathi is the Founder and CEO of CYGNVS, a cybersecurity SaaS platform that serves as the out-of-band command center for cyber crisis readiness and response. A serial entrepreneur with over two decades in Silicon Valley, Arvind previously founded Cyence (acquired by Guidewire Software) and led YarcData (acquired by Cray/HPE) and held SVP roles at Informatica. CYGNVS emerged from stealth in January 2023 with a $55M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and serves 2,500+ enterprise organizations with playbooks, tabletop simulations, and automated regulatory reporting.
Kurt Zenz House is the Co-Founder and CEO of KoBold Metals, an AI-driven mineral exploration company backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Andreessen Horowitz. A Harvard-trained earth scientist and serial energy entrepreneur, he built KoBold from the ground up to solve one of the most consequential problems of the energy transition: finding enough copper, cobalt, lithium, and nickel to power a decarbonized world. Under his leadership, the company discovered the Mingomba deposit in Zambia - potentially the most significant copper find in a century - and raised over $1 billion to develop it. Before KoBold, he founded C12 Energy (CO2-based enhanced oil recovery) and Phase Change Resources (natural gas asset acquisition), and held research and teaching roles at MIT and Stanford.
Rajeev Behera is the co-founder and CEO of Every (every.io), an all-in-one back-office platform for early-stage startups covering banking, payroll, bookkeeping, taxes, compliance, and incorporation. A serial entrepreneur who previously built and sold Reflektive - an HR performance management platform - to Learning Technologies Group after raising $100M+ from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, and TPG, Behera returned from a two-year post-exit break with a mission to eliminate the back-office burden that consumed 30% of his own time as a founder. Every raised a $22.5M Series A led by Redpoint Ventures in September 2024 and has grown to 150+ customers, with roughly half from the Y Combinator network.
Ali Yahya is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) where he leads the firm's crypto investing practice. A Stanford computer scientist and former Google Brain TensorFlow developer, he discovered Bitcoin in 2010 during security research and joined a16z in 2017 as its first full-time crypto investor. He has backed landmark bets including Solana and LayerZero, and is known for his deep technical thesis on privacy, zero-knowledge proofs, and the intersection of AI and crypto infrastructure. Off the charts, he runs a personal life operating system called walrOS built on 16 daily tracked habits and a spaced-repetition learning system.
Carra Wu is a Partner on the a16z crypto investment team, where she leads investments in gaming, media, consumer, and infrastructure. She became the youngest check signer in the firm's history at age 23, ascending from intern to deal partner in under a year - a trajectory that started with a six-sentence cold email to Arianna Simpson. A Harvard applied math dropout fluent in three languages, former HoloLens AR/VR engineer at Microsoft, and one-time ballet dancer, Wu brings a builder's instincts to some of crypto's biggest bets, including Axie Infinity, Friends With Benefits, Yield Guild Games, Story Protocol, and CCP Games.
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.
Samantha Walter is a Healthcare Partner on the Bio + Health team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she helps portfolio companies grow by building strategic partnerships across the care delivery ecosystem - payors, providers, employers, and retail. A University of Wisconsin-Madison finance graduate originally from Minneapolis, she brings deep operational credibility to the VC world: before joining a16z, she built a Direct Contracting Entity at Carelon (then CareMore/Aspire under Anthem/Elevance) in 2020, drove customer success at Quartet Health, and cut her teeth as a healthcare revenue cycle consultant at Huron Consulting Group in New York City. She lives and works in NYC, bridging Silicon Valley capital with real-world healthcare infrastructure.
Samson Wu is a Recruiting Operations Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. With roots in economics from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and formative stints at AIESEC, Uber, and CloudKitchens, he has become a key architect of how a16z and its portfolio companies find and hire world-class talent. He supports the firm's New Media team as an HR Business Partner and brings operational rigor to recruiting functions that span early-stage startups to growth-stage companies across the a16z portfolio.
Sungmo Park is Partner and Head of APAC Go-to-Market at a16z crypto, leading Andreessen Horowitz's first Asian office in Seoul. A quadrilingual strategist who speaks Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and English, Park bridges the gap between Silicon Valley capital and Asia's most dynamic crypto ecosystems. His career spans traditional finance at Nomura, product at NAVER, co-founding OnePlanet (a Polygon-based NFT marketplace backed by Hashed and Animoca Brands), leading APAC business development at Polygon Labs, and serving as APAC Lead at Monad Foundation before joining a16z to anchor its Korea, Singapore, and Japan expansion.
Stephanie Zinn is Editorial Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads editorial strategy and audience growth across Substack, X, YouTube, and search. With over a decade in tech editorial, she previously built editorial teams from scratch at Coinbase and GitHub - generating 15M newsletter subscribers at Coinbase and launching GitHub's influential ReadME Project. She is one of the rare operators who treats clear writing not as a nice-to-have but as a core business asset.
Wayne Goeckeritz is a seasoned cybersecurity channel executive serving as Security Channel Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he supports the firm's Go-To-Market Network across venture teams. With a career spanning decades in IT channel sales, he has held leadership roles at Cisco, Juniper, Crossbeam, NetWitness, Prolexic, Demisto, Palo Alto Networks, Siemplify (acquired by Google Cloud), and SentinelOne, building a reputation as one of the most impactful channel leaders in the cybersecurity industry.
Tips Out (known online as TipsOutBaby) is a gaming entrepreneur and Creator Scout at Andreessen Horowitz's a16z Games division, operating at the intersection of creator culture and venture capital. Best known as co-founder and COO/CEO of One True King (OTK) - the Austin-based creator collective he helped launch in October 2020 alongside Asmongold, Mizkif, Esfand, and Rich Campbell - he has quietly built one of gaming's most ambitious creator-led business empires. Beyond OTK, he co-founded Starforge Systems (a PC hardware company), Mythic Talent (a talent management agency), and Mad Mushroom (a creator-led game publishing label). In October 2023, a16z tapped him as a Games Creator Scout, formalizing his role as a bridge between gaming culture and the startup investment world.
Zahabiya Gabaji is a Compensation Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the world's most influential venture capital firms. Based in San Mateo, California, she leads compensation strategy and people operations for a16z's portfolio and internal teams. With roots in education and arts — she studied English and Education at UC Berkeley and worked at the Berkeley Art Museum — Gabaji made a deliberate pivot into tech HR, scaling compensation programs at Snowflake before joining a16z. At one of the most closely-watched firms in Silicon Valley, she architects the compensation frameworks that help a16z attract and retain world-class talent across its 950-person organization and advise portfolio companies on competitive pay structures.
Stuart Sopp is the British-born CEO and co-founder of Current, one of America's largest New York-based fintech platforms serving nearly 4 million consumers. A former FX and rates trader who spent 15 years at BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, Citi, and Morgan Stanley across four continents, he walked away from Wall Street in 2014 after a CTO-to-be handed him the Bitcoin whitepaper and asked him to reconsider who banking was actually for. Current — built on a proprietary core banking stack, backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global at a $2.2B valuation — targets Americans with sub-620 FICO scores who have been systematically underserved by traditional banks. Sopp aims for IPO readiness by 2026-2027.