Two Huge Exits Show the Power of a16z’s Megafund Model

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) reaped combined outcomes exceeding $8 billion from SpaceX's $60 billion acquisition of Cursor and Stripe's approximately $8 billion acquisition of OpenRouter, on total investments of about $320 million, marking the largest buyout ever of a venture-backed startup. The exits, overseen by a16z general partner Martin Casado, underscore the power of the firm's megafund model, which has returned 6x DPI on its 2009 fund.

The Week In Short Between Cursor and OpenRouter, a16z’s infrastructure practice had a week for the venture history books. OpenAI and Anthropic show strong revenue figures, but hang-ups remain ahead of their planned mega IPOs. Sequoia tops the leaderboard for most investments in newly minted unicorns. A missile startup raises a 10-figure funding round while chip deals stay white hot. A new report says Nvidia is ramping up special chips for China. American public sentiment on data centers hits its lowest point yet. The Main Item Everyone Wants to Claim Credit for Cursor & OpenRouter. They’re Among the Biggest Scores in Venture History. To power a megafund, you need mega-exits. Thankfully for a16z, they are suddenly flowing in, big time. SpaceX this week closed its acquisition of Cursor for $60 billion https://a16z.com/cursor-spacexai-the-fastest-iterating-team-wins/ in stock, the largest buyout ever of a venture-backed startup.Stripe agreed https://a16z.com/openrouter-stripe-the-intelligence-network/ to acquire OpenRouter for around $8 billion, per our sources, in what Axios reported to be a mix of cash and stock. The value of a16z’s combined outcomes in the two companies is north of $8 billion, on total investments that our sources pegged at about $320 million. The speed at which they happened was also extraordinary. Behind the victories sits the firm’s infrastructure practice helmed by general partner Martin Casado, who oversaw term sheets for both Cursor and OpenRouter and held a seat on Cursor’s board at the time of the acquisition. Both deals were buzzy enough that people were jockeying for credit https://x.com/davefontenot/status/2090137936981545272?s=20 on X all week, with a16z partners comparing https://x.com/sarahdingwang/status/2090148354479251893?s=20 Casado’s hot streak to Michael Jordan in the 1990s. A16z first backed Cursor as the lead on its 2024 Series A, then co-led its Series B with Thrive shortly after. Many investors gave kudos https://x.com/rexsalisbury/status/2088360366556508669?s=20 to a16z infra GP Matt Bornstein for initially leading the Cursor deal. Casado acknowledged his role in a post https://x.com/martin casado/status/2014024442767352335?s=20 on Bornstein’s promotion from late January. Anjney Midha , formerly of the a16z infra team, scored the lead slot on OpenRouter’s seed round in 2025, with Casado on the investment memo, as we detailed Thursday. https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-story-of-a-cap-table-openrouter But Midha left the firm shortly after that deal and a16z has publicly stressed the role https://a16z.com/openrouter-stripe-the-intelligence-network/ of Casado and Chris Dixon in making the OpenRouter investment happen. A16z this week also had some good news in the form of the crypto market bounce, with Bitcoin back up over $70,000 for the first time in many months. OpenRouter, in fact, traces its origins to the crypto business — co-founder Alex Atallah was building a marketplace for digital assets before pivoting to a marketplace for LLMs. And acquirer Stripe is keenly interested in tokenization and has already bought various crypto companies. Too Big To Score? There’s been a debate about whether megafunds could truly deliver VC-level returns at such hefty scale. A16z has always been at the center of that debate: its initial $300 million fundraise in 2009 was large enough to reset expectations for what a venture fund could be, and its funds have only continued to balloon. Yet per Newcomer’s https://www.newcomer.co/p/andreessen-horowitz-dpi-numbers-show reporting https://www.newcomer.co/p/andreessen-horowitz-dpi-numbers-show last fall, that first gamble paid off spectacularly well: it returned 6x in DPI and sits in the top 5% of funds from that year. These days, a16z raises more than quadruple that amount of cash for just a single sector. The firm brought in $1.25 billion for its first dedicated AI infra https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/16/andreessen-horowitz-raises-7point2-billion-across-five-funds-.html fund in 2024, as part of a $7.1 billion overall fundraise. It quickly followed that with $1.7 billion https://techcrunch.com/podcast/what-a16z-is-actually-funding-and-what-its-ignoring-when-it-comes-to-ai-infra/ more at the beginning of this year, as part of its $15 billion capital haul. Now a registered investment advisor with a variety of late-stage vehicles alongside more traditional venture funds, a16z is a diversified asset manager with scale that’s starting to rival big Wall Street firms. In March, a16z filed http://file:///Users/ericnewcomer/Downloads/160489%20 2 .pdf that it had $106 billion in assets under management. Still, most of its post-2016 funds had failed to deliver meaningful DPI to limited partners as of the end of 2024, according to the return data obtained by Newcomer . This week’s deals, on top of 2025 wins with Figma https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-figma-the-decade-of-design/ and Wiz https://www.wiz.io/blog/celebrating-our-1-billion-funding-round-and-12-billion-valuation , would certainly change that. At the same time, the firm is also a poster-child for the idea that exits aren’t everything anymore given the growth of private markets. So far, LPs have been willing to go along with that, taking paper gains on Stripe and SpaceX and many others. Now Stripe is showing it can use its shares as currency public-company-style, which works partly because the company strives to make secondaries possible. SpaceX of course is public now, though it’s unclear if and when various investors can unload their shares, even if they want to. Too Big For the DOJ? A16z’s reach across the infrastructure stack has drawn some less welcome attention. Bloomberg reported the Justice Department is investigating https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-17/andreessen-horowitz-focus-of-doj-probe-over-board-directors the firm over board seats at two competing companies: Ben Horowitz at Databricks and Casado at Fivetran. These probes don’t always produce action, but a case against a16z could make it harder for megafirms to spread their bets across the AI stack. Still, for the moment at least, that’s a small worry next to the big wins. Like Thrive, which we wrote about last week https://www.newcomer.co/p/thrive-capital-finds-its-lane-as , a16z is showing that innovative approaches and megafund muscle are a good match for the AI era. Great Expectations OpenAI & Anthropic’s Latest Revenue Figures Are Incredible But Worries Remain Fresh financial details on the frontier labs this week painted a mixed picture, given the bigger context at least. On Monday, Anthropic told investors it had annualized revenue of $65 billion, according to https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-17/anthropic-revenue-run-rate-surpasses-65-billion-ahead-of-ipo Bloomberg, and that it was projecting annual revenue of $190-200 billion by 2028. Then on Tuesday the Wall Street Journal reported https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-second-quarter-sales-show-tepid-growth-compared-with-anthropic-5cb42998 that OpenAI had recently told investors it generated $6.7 billion last quarter — up 18% from the previous quarter and significantly below the $11.5 billion that Anthropic reportedly did during the period. On their own, these numbers are astounding for companies that are barely three years into earning revenue. But considering the pumped-up IPOs and valuations they’re gunning for in the coming months, they also raised some red flags. The biggest were for OpenAI, which scrambled to counter the narrative that its growth was tepid. The day after the Journal’s story, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees that the company’s revenue run rate is up 35% quarter to date and that its enterprise revenue run rate is up 50% quarter to date, according to CNBC. Even Anthropic’s amazing annualized revenue fell a bit short of some of the craziest expectations, like YipitData’s projection of around $80 billion annualized revenue. All these figures will be scrutinized intently as they march toward IPOs in the coming months, carrying much of the AI industry with them. Anthropic may file publicly as soon as this month for an offering that’s likely to smash the recent SpaceX record for biggest-ever IPO, Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-20/anthropic-expects-to-match-spacex-s-record-ipo-size-or-top-it reported. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-20/anthropic-expects-to-match-spacex-s-record-ipo-size-or-top-it As part of the deal, Anthropic has been working to give Dario Amodei and other co-founders a new class of stock https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-prepares-supervoting-power-founders-readies-mega-ipo?rc=aoqvbj with extra voting power in order to shield them from external shareholder pressure, according to The Information. A complicated organizational structure can have its… complications. Machine Earning Apply to Secure Your Spot at Our Machine Earning AI Summit on Sept. 29 in San Francisco We’re five weeks out from Newcomer’s first-ever Machine Earning AI Summit in San Francisco on September 29.We’re bringing together the most prominent venture-backed founders and builders in commerce and AI for a curated invite-only event. Spots are extremely limited, so apply as soon as you can for a chance to attend . One Big Chart Sequoia Has Backed the Most Unicorn Startups So Far in 2026 It’s been quite a year for startups winning unicorn status: some 250 have reached a $1 billion valuation or higher, up from 193 for all of 2025. Per fresh data from Crunchbase’s Unicorn Board https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/unicorn-investors-ai-robotics-2026-sequoia-khosla/ , Sequoia tops the leaderboard for most portfolio companies in this new crop of unicorns, with 52 investments in 29 companies.