It used to be that Vijay Pande was better known in academic circles than investor circles. That changed pretty abruptly a dozen years ago, when Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz — who’d spent their firm’s first five years explicitly avoiding healthcare and life sciences — decided the category was worth betting on after all and
Andreessen Horowitz has launched a new “Machine Age” fund with $1.1 billion raised. The firm’s aim with the new fund is to “open the throttle and accelerate the physical buildout of AI.” The fund will focus on hardware, bucking the firm’s typical focus on the scaling power of software. In a post on the venture
Travis Kalanick’s robotics company Atoms has raised $1.7 billion in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Ben Horowitz will join the company’s board of directors following the investment. Bain Capital, Fifth Wall and others participated in the round. Perhaps most notably, Uber also joined the funding round, reconnecting Kalanick with the company he founded,
