Fintech companies are innovating across broad categories—in banking, lending, insurance, real estate, and investing—both on the customer-facing side and in core infrastructure. We believe the combination of mobile, digital money, AI and machine learning, and new data sources offers startups a unique opportunity to leapfrog outdated infrastructure and compete with incumbent financial institutions to reimagine the way money moves.
Jack Henry CTO Ben Metz shares how banks’ historical tech infrastructure and regulatory obstacles have stymied innovation—and how Jack Henry is helping them overcome these challenges.
An external "AI brain." Big swings in biopharma. Infinite games. A nuclear resurgence. "Faceless" creators. Google search challengers. Battlefield AI. We asked 50 a16z partners to preview one big idea that will spur innovation in 2025.
The VP of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet discusses the challenges she confronted pushing Apple Pay into the mainstream, new Apple verticals on the horizon, and her advice for early entrepreneurs.
Blackstone's CTO describes the qualities he looks for in early stage companies and predicts AI's impact on real estate, credit, and energy.
Latin America is emerging as a tech powerhouse, but it's not a one-size-fits-all market.
A conversation about the role startups are playing in partnership with big banks and where Tim disagrees with the zeitgeist on the adoption of AI in financial services.
With LLMs and AI-enabled data infrastructure, common sales activities will be redefined and completely new seller workflows will emerge.
a16z General Partner David George interviews Capital Group's Mark Casey on his investment philosophy and what sends him into what he calls "barnacle mode."
Here's where AI agents and software can have the most immediate impact on your business, and make you more efficient and productive.
BNY's Akash Shah on the company's approach to adopting AI and what advice he would give to fintech startup founders.
a16z General Partner Angela Strange, Plaid CEO Zach Perret, and Marqeta CEO Simon Khalaf discuss how AI and fintech will shape the future of banking.
a16z General Partner Alex Rampell recently spoke to CEO of Rocket Companies Varun Krishna about his newest role, AI, and the future of real estate.
The stakes are high. The opportunities are profound. From the creation of new medicines to bolstering national defense, this is our vision for the AI-enabled future.
There’s likely a whole category of non-AI companies and products that can FINALLY exist *because of the productivity gains of AI.*
a16z Fintech connects ambitious technology founders with financial services leaders who recognize the power of generative AI.
In this In the Vault episode, a16z General Partner David Haber talks with Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti about fintech, financial services, and GenAI.
In this In the Vault episode, a16z General Partner Angela Strange talks with Jeff Sloan, former CEO of Global Payments, about industry trends and AI.
In this In the Vault episode, a16z General Partner David Haber talks with Sixth Street Partners' Marty Chavez about his storied career and AI's promise.
We have provided many resources in this series for this stage of your business journey. We’d like to wrap up by focusing on how to manage debt post-closing.
a16z’s Alex Immerman chats with Mercury cofounder and CEO Immad Akhund and BILL CEO René Lacerte about fintech's future.
3 financial service giants cornered the market on data at the dawn of the digital age. What can founders learn from them?
Jamil Khan explains how H&R Block is using AI, as well as what advice he would give founders looking to build in this space.
As students of financial markets, we’re keenly interested in moments of inflection which alter market structure, spawn dominant new institutions, and catalyze the growth of new asset classes. Historically, these shifts h...
Over the past decade, data infrastructure across industries has been modernized by many disruptors like Databricks, Fivetran, et al. The modern data stack has made it much easier for companies to ingest, store, query, an...
a16z partner Seema Amble talks with Dimitri Dadiomov, the co-founder and CEO of Modern Treasury, about the challenges of creating a new category.
Smart energy grids. Voice-first companion apps. Programmable medicines. AI tools for kids. We asked over 40 partners across a16z to preview one big idea they believe will drive innovation in the coming year.
Episode Transcript
a16z partner Seema Amble talks with the founder and current executive chairman of Marqeta Jason Gardner about how to expand in multiple verticals.
a16z partner Seema Amble talks with co-founder and CEO of Pilot Waseem Daher on pricing and never stepping away from doing founder-led sales.
a16z partner Seema Amble talks with co-founder and CEO of Mercury Immad Akhund about how to compete in a category already filled with incumbents.
We aim to demystify the “B2FI” (or “business to financial institution”) for fintech companies, with lessons from those who have experienced it.
Embarking on a debt raise can be a daunting task and we aim to demystify the debt-raising process at large and navigate you through it.
TipTop creates tools that reduce the consumer code of owning products. They offer customers a guaranteed buyback price at the time of purchase, so they only pay for the product while they need it.
How cross-border infrastructure, instant payments, and open banking advances are creating a more integrated, financially inclusive world.
The company of the future is default global. Top fintech entrepreneurs are pursuing integrated cross-border payment infrastructure and full-stack solutions.
The process of moving money between countries is complicated and costly. Here's how foreign exchange works and what happens when you send money abroad.
The UK is the goldilocks of financial services: big enough to be meaningful on a global scale, but small enough to make decisions faster than the U.S. or the rest of Europe.
Fintech has the potential to fully drive India’s economy. One major factor: the Reserve Bank of India has enacted progressive regulations at a rapid pace.
Advances in licensing and open finance, the promise of ubiquitous instant payments, and regulatory support for solutions are feeding a fintech surge.
Through the introduction of open banking and other regulatory advances, the B2B sector is poised to reshape the financial landscape for enterprises in Mexico.
a16z will lead the Series A of Moment, a new company building infrastructure that abstracts away the complexities of embedding fixed income investments in any application.
Generative AI is likely going to usher in a far more profound method of company transformation.
Many digital-first companies have been propelled by generative AI. However, selling these digital products globally is not a straightforward undertaking. Here's how to simplify the cross-border selling experience, get in front of the right customers, and build long-term value.
Thanks to generative AI, the much-discussed topic of “self-driving money” finally has a chance to achieve its potential.
When pricing a new B2B fintech product or service, simplicity is the key, especially at the earliest stages.
Though there has been a significant increase in the number of funds and banks offering debt financing to startups in Brazil, many founders in the country still find raising debt capital to be a complicated process. This resource offers a practical roadmap.
Those who complain about hallucinations miss the point. A dispersion of outputs (including hallucinations) will unlock a whole new category of product design: probabilistic products.
At this early stage in generative AI, technologists and product pickers will likely have the biggest impact on which companies emerge as winners.
This deep dive explores the sustainable differentiation that results in a compounding flywheel, with a focus on financial services companies that sell commodity-like, nonphysical world products like money and insurance.
How technology will make our healthcare system more intuitive, efficient, and cost-effective.
We believe there is a significant opportunity for startups to serve companies building in high-risk industries like games, sports betting, and cannabis.
The emergence of generative AI could yield the largest transformation the financial services market has seen in decades.
Visa and Mastercard currently facilitate more than three-quarters of all credit card transactions in the United States, at a time when post-pandemic Americans are now using credit or debit cards for roughly 57% of all tr...
This article is the second of four installments in our new series, How Fintech Companies Can Simplify Their Funding Strategy. Read part one on Choosing the Right Funding Structure here.
Debt is daunting—its labyrinth of complex rules, opaque governing bodies, and unique vernacular makes it difficult for the average consumer to understand. Concepts like credit scores, APRs, retroactive interest, and coll...
Cyber incidents have reached a crisis level over the past decade. In 2021, the U.S. saw 1,862 data compromises, affecting nearly 300 million people (a nearly 100% increase from five years ago). Cybersecurity practitioner...
As we first shared in 2019, everything is relative — especially home prices in the Bay Area. These prices have continued to rise on an absolute basis over the last 12 years; the typical home in Palo Alto, for example, ro...
What counts as "cash," developing a plan for that cash, building an adaptable operating model, and dealing with a liquidity crisis.
Multifamily real estate in the U.S., which includes apartment buildings, condominiums, townhouses, and mixed-use developments, is one of the largest asset classes in the world. Approximately 44 million residences are con...
Behind many of life’s most important financial transactions — be it buying a house, applying for a mortgage, getting a small business loan, or refinancing a personal credit card — exist a network of trust and credit rela...
If you were interested in quickly launching a startup, here’s an easy formula for finding product market fit. First, identify an existing product in an industry with a low NPS (like most financial services) that has not...
Historically, wealth managers offered consumers a choice: either put their money on autopilot (through an offering like Vanguard’s low-fee ETFs) or — if wealthy enough — be actively managed by an advisor at somewhere lik...
In this episode of a16z Live, we are joined by Titan co-founder and co-CEO Clayton Gardner; a16z General Partner Anish Acharya; and a16z growth partner, Alex Immerman. The trio starts their conversation by diving into th...
Instant payments, tiered licensing for fintech startups, sandbox programs, and other regulatory changes have had a marked impact on financial services.
Choosing the right funding structure can have a meaningful impact on the trajectory of your company, its ability to scale, and your bottom line.
Freight is quite literally one of the backbones of the U.S. economy. Every year, shippers spend $800 billion dollars moving goods across the country, and as everyone learned firsthand over the past two years, one small h...
As we write in our piece It’s All About The Money (Movement), moving money internationally is an opaque, fee-intensive process that requires two things: actually “moving” the money and leveraging onboarding and complianc...
The way businesses move money internationally has not changed in decades. Why do cross-border transactions take so long and cost so much to complete? The distributed global ledger is to blame. Here are the three key wedges to create other types of business payments.
Over the past several years, the field of fintech infrastructure has exploded with venture capital investment and entrepreneurial attention. Between the emergence of Stripe, Plaid, and other category-defining decacorns;...
As I reflect upon my experience building Bond Street (an SMB lending startup we sold to Goldman Sachs in 2017), one of the biggest challenges we faced was in scaling customer acquisition. In retrospect, there were two cr...
Much opportunity exists to build a modern software stack that supports the next generation of default global companies, from local employment law and talent sourcing to multi-country incorporation and expense management.
Buying traditional insurance is a no-brainer if you want to protect assets of value—be it your life, your home, or your business. If you own, say, a building, chances are you’ll want to minimize your risk against fires,...
At its core, wealth management is fairly straightforward: an advisor helps a customer optimize their tax and investment strategies to maximize wealth creation and preservation. But while this premise may seem simple, its...
We wrote about the CFO in crisis mode and the need for better software to be built for the finance suite. If the average CFO is in a crisis, the emerging markets CFO serve are in an even bigger crisis! In LatAm for insta...
The fintech revolution, in which every company becomes a fintech company, is one of the most significant technology trends this decade. We are big believers in this vision and expect that in the next 10+ years, the $2 tr...
Building and scaling a company is HARD. The mechanics of just getting set up should not be.
What is the future of finance? Our team of investors knows first-hand how innovations in banking and lending can pave the way for the entrepreneurs of tomorrow harnessing the power of digital money and AI. We’re here to navigate them to the top.
Featuring interviews with key decision makers from the biggest Financial Institutions in the world.
LISTENAny investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described on this page are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. Exits include current and former a16z portfolio companies which have been acquired as well as companies which have undergone an initial public offering or direct public offering of shares. Certain publicly traded companies on this list may still be held in Andreessen Horowitz funds. A list of investments made by funds managed by a16z is available here: https://a16z.com/investments/. Excluded from this list are investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets. Further, the list of investments is updated monthly and as such may not reflect most recent a16z investments. Past results of Andreessen Horowitz’s investments, pooled investment vehicles, or investment strategies are not necessarily indicative of future results.
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