Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has made headlines for its American dynamism thesis, but a U.S. passport is no longer a prerequisite for success. According to Gabriel Vasquez, a partner focusing on AI apps and the firm’s global investment strategy, “44% of our investments in the Apps Fund One and Two have an international founder.” This striking statistic underscores a fundamental shift in how the top-tier venture capital firm views the relationship between a startup’s geography and its potential for success.
AI foreign founders are now at the center of this shift. Together with general partner Angela Strange, Vasquez is the driving force behind a16z’s Borderless Founder network, an initiative specifically designed to support immigrant and international founders. The premise has evolved from a belief that great companies could be born anywhere, to a conviction that AI foreign founders now possess a distinct advantage over their American peers.
A New Breed of Global Talent
The U.S. has always attracted foreign founders, but in the current AI-dominated cycle, a16z acknowledges that their international roots are more valuable than ever. “There is now an advantage to having one foot in your home country, and one foot in Silicon Valley,” Strange and Vasquez wrote in a post shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
This advantage is so significant for AI foreign founders that a16z has committed to spending “more than one million air miles” to pursue international deal flow. Vasquez explained that this strategy departs from the traditional expectation that every founding team must relocate to the U.S. to secure funding. This operational shift reflects a broader understanding of how global business is conducted in the age of AI.
Changing Buying Patterns
The changing dynamic isn’t just about talent; it’s about the market itself. Vasquez noted a marked shift in buying patterns among enterprise clients. Historically, especially for enterprise startups, “the buyers from countries outside the U.S. were not moving rapidly, and their willingness to pay was very low.” However, this pattern has reversed dramatically “in the last three to five years.”
AI as a Market Driver
Startups are now able to secure major companies worldwide as customers, even in markets previously considered less cutting-edge. When a16z started hearing international seed-stage startups pitch their work with Fortune 500 companies, “we thought this might be an exception, but it was clearly a trend,” Vasquez said.
In Europe, corporations were once notorious for engaging with startups only through open innovation programs, rarely using their main checkbooks. The challenge was so significant that France launched a dedicated initiative, “I Choose French Tech,” to combat the hesitation. However, Vasquez points to AI as the primary driver making this shift a reality.
AI has forced legacy players to realize they must buy third-party solutions to remain competitive, even in regions like Latin America where human labor was once cheap. “Software never really picked up in the region, because you were competing with cheap labor,” Vasquez recalled. Now, with AI agents that are “always on” and increasingly accurate, adoption has become common.
The Speed Advantage of AI Foreign Founders
Despite the opportunity, American startups often can’t move fast enough to capture the entire global market. “There’s so much appetite at the enterprise level for companies all around the world to consume AI, but American [startups] don’t have the speed yet to go serve the entire market from day zero, so they obviously prioritize U.S. companies,” Vasquez said.
This gap leaves the door open for AI foreign founders to sell solutions to companies in their home countries while splitting their time between those regions and the U.S. “The concept of headquarters is something that is changing a lot; it’s just more fluid,” Vasquez noted, adding that even governments seem to agree. A prime example is Poland, which recently took a stake in a16z portfolio company ElevenLabs. The voice AI startup only has a subsidiary in Poland, but its customers include InPost and LOT Polish Airlines.
Access to Global Talent Pools
From Vasquez’s perspective, access to talent is a key differentiator for AI foreign founders. “Right now, recruiting in Silicon Valley is the hardest thing, because you’re competing with Anthropic and OpenAI that have raised billions and billions of dollars for the best talent,” he explained. International founders can tap into the talent pools that exist in numerous places outside the U.S., avoiding the intense competition of Silicon Valley.
This global pursuit of talent is why Vasquez has been spending so much time on a plane, often in Stockholm, in search of the next unicorn. Many of the top AI scaleups are European academic spinouts, and VCs are aggressively pursuing them. As Dealroom founder Yoram Wijngaarde aptly put it: “European talent remains one of America’s biggest startup advantages.”
The landscape for venture capital and startup success is undergoing a significant transformation. While the U.S. remains a powerhouse, AI foreign founders are leveraging their global networks and unique market access to build companies that are reshaping industries. For a16z, the numbers speak for themselves, confirming that the future of innovation is borderless.
