Fivetran

Two Huge Exits Boost a16z’s Megafund Model

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) saw two major outcomes this week: SpaceX closed its acquisition of Cursor for $60 billion in stock, and Stripe agreed to acquire OpenRouter for around $8 billion, according to reporting. The combined value of a16z’s stakes in the two companies is reported to be north of $8 billion on roughly $320 million of investment. The deals were driven by a16z’s infrastructure practice led by general partner Martin Casado and involved other a16z personnel including Matt Bornstein and Chris Dixon. The story also highlights large reported revenue run rates at frontier AI firms (Anthropic, OpenAI), ongoing DOJ scrutiny of a16z over board seats, and broader implications for mega-funds, IPOs, and private-market liquidity.

DOJ Probe Targets Andreessen Horowitz Board Seats

The U.S. Department of Justice has been probing Andreessen Horowitz’s board-seat arrangements for nearly a year, focusing on partner Ben Horowitz’s seat at Databricks and partner Martin Casado’s seat at Fivetran, which combined with dbt Labs in June. Reported by Bloomberg and TechCrunch, the inquiry invokes Section 8 of the Clayton Act — a 112-year-old antitrust provision rarely used against venture capital firms — and centers on whether serving on boards of companies that later compete violates the law. The case has broad implications for venture governance: enforcement could force investors to relinquish seats, prompt new firewall practices (so-called “Chinese walls”), or otherwise change how VCs manage overlapping portfolios as companies expand into each other’s markets.

Rippling launches Data Cloud to measure AI ROI

Rippling today launched Rippling Data Cloud, a product that embeds analytics and organisational context inside its human-capital-management platform to surface workforce insights — including which employees generate value from AI tool spend. CEO Parker Conrad demonstrated dashboards that combine data from sources such as Anthropic usage logs, GitHub pull requests, Salesforce tickets and internal performance ratings to identify over‑spend and under‑performance, and to enforce spending limits or alerts. Rippling also announced a Business Banking product with high-yield checking and same‑day payroll. The company says roughly 560 companies use the AI features, generating about $5–7 million of new monthly revenue; the base SKU with Rippling AI is around $20 per month with usage-based charges for heavy consumption. Conrad said Rippling has shifted much usage from Anthropic to OpenAI’s 5.5 model and reiterated the company is not planning an IPO soon.