BREAKINGVIEWS-Marc Andreessen will summon NYC swagger for IPO

By Jonathan Guilford

NEW YORK, Dec 23 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Marc Andreessen made it in Silicon Valley. His next act may be to conquer the concrete jungle. Together with Ben Horowitz, he has led their eponymous venture capital firm, shorthanded as a16z, into the top echelon of technology financers since its 2009 founding. In that time, the industry has transformed from remote investors placing small, high-risk bets into something more familiar to its heavyweight buyout kin in New York. In 2026, Andreessen will go one further, following private equity onto public markets.

Talk to smaller VC shops, and an anxiety emerges: check sizes are rising, founders are wooed by sprawling organizations offering operational support, and the biggest firms are taking an outsized share of tepid fundraising. The artificial intelligence era is accelerating the trend. In the third quarter of 2025, 40% of activity by value came from just nine investments of $1 billion or more, according to PitchBook data.

As smaller rounds decline, the top 10 firms captured 43% of fundraising dollars, while total industry assets under management have roughly flatlined since 2021. a16z is among the small pool of winners, the third-largest U.S. VC firm with $46 billion in assets and the second most active North American investor in early-stage and late-stage deals. It has bootstrapped the likes of Meta Platforms, Stripe and OpenAI.

Simplistically assuming a 2% management fee on the firm’s stockpile implies an over $900 million haul, though this elides performance payouts, step-downs and so on. Still, a16z is approaching the scale that prompted east-coast private equity firms Blackstone BX.N, KKR KKR.N and Carlyle CG.O to list in the 2000s. If there is one thing that their experience has proven, it’s that public-market investors love asset growth and the chunky fees that come with it. As the New York vanguard has pivoted ever further into a fee-based model, their valuations have exploded, with Blackstone’s stock more than doubling in the last half-decade.

a16z seems to aspire to their scale, targeting a $20 billion fund size, quadruple its largest so far, Reuters reported in April. Take Brookfield Asset Management, which in December traded at 17 times its expected top-line fee haul from steering investments in 2025. On the same basis, a16z currently would be worth $15 billion. If it hits its desired mega-fund ideal, it would be worth an additional $6.8 billion.

In 1995, Andreessen helped transform financial criteria and how investors viewed public markets. The IPO of Netscape, the money-losing web browser he architected, was a smashing success that defied conventional thinking. This time again, traditionalists might look on ruefully. But Andreessen Horowitz might just be ready to swagger past them.

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This is a Reuters Breakingviews prediction for 2026.