A16Z Investor Relations is now Global Partnerships
Technology used to be a small segment of the economy. Now it's how countries dominate.
America | Tech | Opinion | Culture | Charts
This piece from Jen Kha, Managing Partner and Head of Global Partnerships, is a part of today’s announcement: A16z’s Global Mission | Ben Horowitz
Technology used to be a small segment of the economy. Now it’s how countries dominate - economically, militarily, culturally. That also means how founders win is evolving. The most ambitious founders are now building on a much larger scale and choosing VC partners who can confer power to access, relationships and capital.
To help our portfolio and therefore, Limited Partners (LPs), succeed, we are evolving our role beyond traditional Investor Relations. Our new mandate is to not just support our LPs, but help our founders bring the most important technology to America and her Allies. That is why Investor Relations is now Global Partnerships.
With this expanded mandate, we will:
Connect our LPs to the best founders building the future for both investment and partnership opportunities
Engage a new class of institutional investors that can bring more than capital including market access, regulatory reach and distribution
And by doing so, enable founders who are going international from day one, by linking them to aligned sovereign, institutional, and strategic capital and technology adopters.
Examples in action:
Luma. We facilitated a partnership between Luma and HUMAIN AI, who led their $900M Series C and are now partnering on a 2GW AI Supercluster in Saudi Arabia.
Kalshi. We’ve engaged with international government leaders regarding prediction markets, including the importance of establishing a clear regulatory framework to ensure market integrity, investor protection, transparency, and responsible innovation within the sector.
Tokyo office. We announced plans for a new international office alongside multiple collaboration opportunities with Japanese companies and the Ministry of Defense during a recent meeting with Prime Minister Takaichi.
What this means for our Limited Partners:
For our LPs, this is an extension of what a16z has always stood for. We help our founders win by giving them access to our network and accelerating their success. Global Partnerships is the latest expression of that commitment now expanded globally. When our companies successfully expand and distribute internationally, our LPs benefit.
What this means for our Founders:
For our founders, Global Partnerships means having a partner who can open doors at the highest levels of sovereign and institutional capital, find the customers and distribution channels that matter most and support international scale. This ensures that as we bring frontier technology into new markets, we are doing so with the strategic relationships and geopolitical fluency those markets require.
In short, the mandate is simple: connect the best founders to the capital and countries they need to win in this next era.
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The Luma + HUMAIN example is the Western version of what Chinese strategic capital has built domestically. The difference is the structure. When CATL puts 740M into a Chinese AI company, it is not just an LP return play. CATL is also a customer, a distribution channel, and a regulatory stakeholder for that company at the same time. The LP and the go-to-market are the same entity. a16z is building the global version of that structure deal by deal: find an LP who brings market access, regulatory reach, and distribution, not just capital. Saudi Aramco + HUMAIN + Luma is structurally analogous to CATL + Manus + Chinese robotics supply chain. The key difference is timeline. Chinese state-adjacent capital can hold a position through multiple deployment cycles without fund life pressure. The LP who needs a 10-year return window cannot. That is the structural asymmetry that Global Partnerships is running against in every non-allied market. I scan 100+ Chinese sources daily at China AI Dispatch.
The evolution from Investor Relations to Global Partnerships is not semantic. It reflects the emergence of a new institutional layer where capital, sovereign alignment, energy, compute, cybersecurity, identity, and geopolitical trust increasingly converge.
The next decade will likely be defined less by isolated software platforms and more by trusted infrastructure ecosystems across allied nations.