Venture Geopolitics Issue 30
13 Jan 2026
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) raised $15B, more than the next two largest US venture raises combined and equivalent to 18% of all US VC allocated in 2025.
The firm has been explicit that this capital is intended to help the US “win” technologically, framing AI, crypto, defence, infrastructure and biotech as strategic assets tied to national power.
a16z sits close to Washington, its first employee now runs the Office of Personnel Management, its leadership advises the Trump administration, and its partnership with Booz Allen connects portfolio companies directly into US government procurement.
Capital, policy and the state have converged.
The strength of this model is speed and execution. Tight links between venture, government and procurement lower friction, create early customers and accelerate deployment in strategically important sectors. The trade-off is directionality, with incentives, ownership and long-term control concentrating around a narrow set of individuals and institutions.
Europe faces a different conundrum: first, access to capital at this scale; and second, the absence of institutional bridges between venture and the state. Without deep pockets and reliable pathways into defence buyers, infrastructure operators or sovereign customers, European companies building strategic technologies will continue to turn to US capital not just for funding, but for access — importing governance norms, exit paths and geopolitical alignment.
IPOs / Publics
US IPO calendar empty for next 2 weeks - a slow January isn’t unusual
Hong Kong’s recent AI listings included Iluvatar CoreX (GPU designer) +20% & Edge Medical (surgical robots) +30% on debut. OmniVision (integrated circuits) & GigaDevice (memory chips) queued next (here)
Discord (chat platform) filed confidentially for a US listing
Strava (fitness app) filed confidentially & hired Goldman Sachs - revenue reportedly +50% last year to <$500M, profitable, c.150M active users across 185 countries, last valued at $2.2B incl debt (here)
BitGo (crypto custody) targeting up to $201M in IPO proceeds at up to $1.96B (here)
PicPay (Brazilian fintech) reapplied for US IPO after scrapping a prior attempt (here)
Meta has hired Curtis Joseph Mahoney (ex Trump administration Deputy USTR + former Microsoft general counsel) as chief legal officer, while Dina Powell McCormick (ex Trump Deputy National Security Adviser, also served in the George W Bush administration & later a senior Goldman Sachs partner) joins as president/vice-chair overseeing AI investments - explicit signal that regulatory risk management & Washington alignment sit inside the AI capex function. Trump commented on Truth “A great choice by Mark Z!!!” (here and here)
Meta’s new infra push comes with multi-decade nuclear procurement (incl deals with Vistra plus support for Oklo & TerraPower) totalling up to 6.6GW (here)
Alphabet hit a $4T market cap after Apple confirmed Gemini integration plans, making it the fourth company to reach that level (after Apple, Microsoft & Nvidia). Gemini now set to power future apple intelligence features, including Siri. Apple had previously worked with OpenAI, underscoring that rivalry (here)
Google’s AI shopping ads get more personalised - ‘AI mode’ ad units shift from keyword placement toward tailored offers (discounts, exclusives), as AI chat becomes a new surface area for commerce & ad-routing (here)
Big Dogs
ChatGPT Health launches - OpenAI says >40M people use ChatGPT daily for health info & >5% of global messages are healthcare-related; ‘Health’ is pitched as a separate environment to connect records/apps with additional controls (not available in Europe) (here)
OpenAI agreed to buy Torch (health data app) for c.$100M in equity, reportedly to accelerate health-data ingestion inside the product stack (here)
Anthropic reportedly raising $10B at $350B; also launched Claude Cowork (agent-style workflows for non-coding tasks) as a research preview in the macOS app for Claude Max users, with folder access + connectors (Asana/Notion/PayPal) & the obvious warning label: “this can delete things if you’re sloppy” (here & here)
xAI raised $20B Series E; claims reach across X + Grok of c.600M MAUs (here)
Lambda (GPU cloud) in talks to raise $350M+ pre-IPO via convert at a discount to IPO price; reported $520M revenue (to Sept 2025) with a $175M loss, showing how quickly ‘neocloud’ is becoming a capital-markets story (here)
Venture Capital
US VC fundraising fell 35% in 2025. LPs concentrated into incumbents while liquidity stayed scarce, pushing the biggest AI cheques toward sovereign pools & non-traditional capital (here)
Andreessen Horowitz raised >$15B across new funds (Growth $6.75B; Apps $1.7B; Infra $1.7B; American Dynamism $1.176B; Bio/Health $700M; plus other venture strategies) - equivalent to 18% of all US VC dollars allocated in 2025 (here)
Lux Capital raised $1.5B Fund IX (frontier science/defence/AI) (here)
Antler raised $160M for a second US-focused fund (here)
Regulation
Character.AI & Google settled suits tied to teen self-harm - among the earliest meaningful settlements testing where ‘product liability’ begins for consumer AI experiences (here)
Malaysia & Indonesia blocked Grok over AI-generated sexualised images of real people; separately Google pulled AI overviews for some medical queries after reports of dangerous errors, a reminder that ‘safety’ is being defined by whoever has jurisdiction + leverage (here)
US export controls move to “remote access” - the Remote Access Security Act would expand controls to restrict Chinese firms’ ability to rent advanced US chips abroad (SE Asia data centres etc), targeting the ‘compute laundering’ channel rather than the physical box (here)
Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel has donated $3M to a group opposed to California’s proposed wealth tax. Relatedly, the Google co-founders Larry Page & Sergey Brin are cutting some ties with the state (here & here)
Venture Geopolitics
Venezuela oil flows restart under US licensing - post-Maduro, the administration enabled US-licensed firms/traders to lift c.30–50M barrels of Venezuelan crude with revenues routed via escrow structures, alongside limited prisoner releases + reopened diplomatic contacts (here)
DOJ opened a criminal probe into Chair Jerome Powell & the response was unusually strong: three former Fed chairs publicly defended Fed independence, joined by senior ex economic officials & even Republican senators on banking oversight - the subtext is that credible monetary policy depends on insulation from electoral incentives (here)
Saudi Arabia opens its equity market to all foreign investors - from 1 Feb, Riyadh scrapped “qualified foreign investor” gating for direct trading in 262 listed firms, part of the broader Vision 2030 liquidity push (here)
Europe backs Nato “Arctic Sentry” as Trump escalates Greenland talk - Denmark pledged $13.8B for Greenland’s defence posture as European capitals try to signal alliance credibility while also treating rare earths + Arctic access as strategic infrastructure rather than “far away & frozen” (here)
TSMC & Taiwan trade talks - NYT reports a prospective deal tying tariff relief to major incremental chip fabs in Arizona, effectively converting industrial policy into trade policy, with semiconductors as the collateral (here)
Strategic Sectors
AI
DeepSeek V4 expected soon - reporting suggests a Lunar New Year window (mid-Feb) for a new flagship that’s strong on long coding prompts, the recurring pattern being: open models compress capability spreads, then distribution + workflow integration become the real battleground (here)
Nvidia & Eli Lilly committing $1B over 5 years to an AI drug discovery lab, a neat tell that chipmakers are now hunting demand sinks beyond hyperscalers, while pharma hunts throughput in target discovery (here)
PlayStation is exploring letting AI take over your game when you are stuck and have patented a related feature. Andrew Rettek: Experienced adult gamers will hate this, but kids will love it. If it’s done well it’ll be a great tutorial tool. It’s a specific instance of an AI teaching tool, and games are low stakes enough for real experimentation in that space (here)
Defence
The UKs chief of the defence staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, told a committee of MPs on Monday that the UK is “not as ready as we need to be for the king of full-scale conflict that we might face”. The continued delay of the DIP (Defence Investment Plan) which is designed to flesh out the SDR (Strategic Defence Review) that launched last summer has been causing exasperation. Knighton declined to comment on reports that the funding gap implementing the SDR could be as much as $28B over the next decade, as has been reported by the FT (here)
On Truth Social, Trump posted a warning to US defence contractors, against prioritising dividends, stock buybacks & excessive pay over investing in production capacity. He argues this has led to slow manufacturing & poor maintenance of military equipment. Until these problems are fixed, he says dividends, buybacks & executive pay above $5M should be halted, with funds redirected to producing & sustaining military equipment (here)
A16Z + Booz Allen - partnership to help A16Z-backed companies sell into the US government, reflecting how ‘go-to-market in national security’ is increasingly being productised as an adjacency. “Working with governments is just very, very different than working with regular enterprise customers,” Ben Horowitz, a founder of a16z, told DealBook. “And Booz Allen has got a lot of experience in that” (here)
Energy & Climate
Berlin blackout after arson - sabotage cut power to c.45k households & 2.2k businesses (incl hospitals/nursing homes) for days in freezing temperatures; if a small activist cell can generate multi-day urban disruption via a cable duct, the uncomfortable question is what a competent state actor could do with the same playbook across multiple nodes (here)
China’s build-rate gap is now the story - at current trajectories, China could reach 100% renewables by 2051 while the US hits it in 2148 without permitting/grid reform; China also commissioned >65 GWh of grid-scale battery storage in December alone - more than the US added in all of 2025 (here)
The Energy Department awarded $900M to General Matter, a Peter Thiel-backed nuclear startup (here)
Critical Resources
Pentagon takes a $150M stake in US gallium supply - gallium is a defence-grade input (radar, missile seekers, satellites) where China accounted for ~99% of refined supply in 2025; equity-style intervention is a sign the US is treating minerals like strategic manufacturing, not “commodities” (here)
Glencore & Rio Tinto restart mega-merger talks (here)
Cybersecurity
China hacked email systems of US congressional committee staff as part of a massive and ongoing cyber espionage campaign (Salt Typhoon). Email systems accessed included intelligence committee, armed services committee etc. Attacks are latest in ongoing cyber ampaign against US communication networks by the Ministry of State Security, China’s intelligence service. Chinese embassy denies allegations (here)
Meanwhile, The Telegraph had another article on China’s super-embassy and its secret chamber likely to be built in central London, beside some of Britain’s most sensitive communications cables. Keir Starmer is poised to approve a new supersized Chinese embassy in the heart of London this week (here)
UK Cyber Security & Resilience Bill is inching through. Second Reading set out the government’s intent to update NIS 2018: bring data centres/MSPs/large load controllers into scope, tighten incident reporting, strengthen regulator powers & align expectations to the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework; committee scrutiny runs into early March with Royal Assent currently pencilled for late 2026 (here)
Instagram denied a breach after mass password-reset emails, saying an external actor triggered legitimate prompts; security firm Malwarebytes disputes this, claiming data from 17.5M accounts is being sold on hacker forums (here)
Notable deals
Cyera (data security posture - discovers/classifies/protects sensitive data) raised $400M at $9B (here)
Torq (security operations automation) raised $140M at $1.2B (here)
Blackbird.AI (disinformation/narrative risk protection) raised $28M (here)
CrowdStrike is buying SGNL (identity access/authorisation) for c.$740M (here)
EVs / AVs
Waymo expanded service across the full SF–San Jose corridor, including freeways - a milestone for longer rides, but one that exposes a core challenge for AVs: strictly obeying posted speed limits in traffic that routinely flows faster can be both slower and less safe! (here)
Tesla’s Europe slump continues - full-year registrations show Tesla sales down nearly 28% in 2025 across major European markets (except Norway), highlighting how demand, brand politics & local competition are now entangled (here)
Mobileye buys Mentee Robotics (humanoid robotics) for c.$900M, pushing ‘embodied autonomy’ into a scale player that already knows how to ship safety-critical systems (here)
Crypto
Senate GOP crypto bill revisions - the new package tries to win sceptics with investor safeguards (limits on yield-style stablecoin “interest”, more explicit disclosures on rewards) while still pushing the industry’s preferred endpoint: CFTC-led spot oversight & clearer token classification (here)
Chen Zhi, the China-born chairman of Cambodia-based Prince Group, was arrested & extradited to China after U.S. prosecutors accused him of running a pig butchering scam empire that targeted Americans & seized roughly $12B in bitcoin tied to the operation (here)
A16Z crypto funds vs generalist - returns data suggests A16Z’s 2020 crypto fund (TVPI 4.1x; DPI 1.8x as of Sept 2025) has distributed meaningfully more cash than comparable-vintage general funds, underscoring why “policy + plumbing” has become a venture strategy (here)