Andreessen Horowitz

We’re thrilled to back Salient cofounders Ari Malik and Mukund Tibrewala as they streamline the complexities of consumer lending with AI. Millions of Americans have some form of consumer debt, but interacting with customer service often involves outdated, manual processes. Salient is building AI agents to handle routine workflows and borrower interactions across voice, text, email, and chat, lowering costs and improving the customer experience. The company has processed over $1B in transactions in two years, cut handling times by 60%, and is working with major financial services and banking institutions.

Marc Andreessen says fiction is dead, because reality is now the better story engine. “Actual lives, wars, politics, presidential impeachments, people going to prison. The stakes are just so much higher.” Culture has pivoted. We now live inside a 24/7 reality show. The winners are those who can frame the chaos.

Marc Andreessen says social media is an x-ray machine, revealing what legacy media used to keep hidden. "And so the world that you experience with social media as a consumer is completely different." We’ve moved from mediated trust to direct scrutiny. The filter is gone. Everything’s visible now.

Excited to share some news: Mintlify has acquired Trieve! Trieve is a RAG infrastructure provider that powers Mintlify's search and AI assistant - helping deliver over 23 million answers a month across customer docs. We first met Nick and Denzell during their YC days and were immediately impressed by what they built. Trieve was fast, developer-first, and built for how modern LLM systems actually work. As we expanded our own investment in delivering accurate, real-time answers from documentation, the alignment with Trieve—both in technical approach and product vision—became increasingly clear. When the opportunity came to bring our teams together, the decision was obvious. We believe the future of documentation is conversational, instant and accurate. And we couldn’t be more excited to build it with people who care just as deeply about craft and developer experience. Welcome to the team, Trieve!

Trump was the bridge. What comes next is the pure form. Marc Andreessen says future politicians won’t adapt to the internet. They’ll emerge from it. “At some point, I think they’ll completely disconnect from legacy media and just run a completely internet play.” A new class of leaders, fluent in the feed, untethered from legacy press.

We asked Mariana Minerals CEO Turner Caldwell on what he learned at Tesla: “Tesla had to vertically integrate from day one, because people weren’t making the parts that were needed.” “It was do or die.” When an industry is too broken, the only way to innovate is to do everything yourself. Turner is now applying these lessons to build Mariana Minerals, the only vertically integrated, software-first mining co.

Usage-based pricing doesn’t just change how you charge, it changes your entire company. You’re no longer selling access. You’re selling outcomes. And your pricing model needs to reflect that value. If you’re a CEO, this changes how you need to think about every function from sales to engineering to finance. Every team has to align around delivering value. Metronome CEO Scott Woody lays out what that shift requires and how to do it right.

Diode Computers, Inc. is using AI to design circuit boards, simplifying messy, slow workflows. We’re excited to invest in Diode to scale manufacturing of hardtech in the US.   Circuit boards are in every smartphone, medical device, and fighter jet. Better circuit design means more of the tech we rely on. Full blog post here: https://xmrrwallet.com/cmx.plnkd.in/g-QtZsgb None of the above should be taken as investment advice or an advertisement for investment services; please see https://xmrrwallet.com/cmx.plnkd.in/gjmYWkHi for more information. For a full list of portfolio companies, visit https://xmrrwallet.com/cmx.plnkd.in/g7hjSuHb.

It’s here! I’m thrilled to announce the Navan Business Travel Index (BTI for short)! Investors, CFOs, finance leaders and data nerds (like me) need to check out the full report here: navan.com/bti Drop a comment about which findings you think are most interesting or surprising (hint: I like the compare versus TSA data)! 📊

Founders keep asking: What does real breakout velocity look like in AI? This issue breaks down the patterns we’re seeing across product, growth, GTM, and defensibility from leading enterprise AI companies. It features takeaways from our latest article, From Demos to Deals, plus conversations with leaders from Box, dbt Labs, Metronome, Labelbox, Prepared, Vanta, and Arcjet and deep dives on GTM, infra, data, and more. Some takeaways: - “Flashy demos are easy. Substantive products are hard.” - 10X is the new 3x: “The fastest growing AI software companies today are growing more than 10x year over year.” - “AI software often sells the work output itself, instead of selling software to help the people do the work.” - “There’s an incredible amount of value to being the first to establish yourself as that provider.” - “AI itself is not a moat: it is a way to deliver value to customers.” - “AI is changing the value prop of software.” AI shifts the buyer calculus from access to output and business models have to follow. (Scott Woody) - “Analytics always expands to fill the available budget.” Cheaper compute and better tools are creating entirely new demand for data-driven decision-making. (Tristan Handy) - “The world is shifting from building AI models to renting AI intelligence.” Teams don’t want to train models, they want modular, enterprise-grade AI they can plug into. (Manu Sharma) Check it out and subscribe: