Over the past 18 months, US VC giant Andreessen Horowitz has been building up its scout base in Europe.
The firm now has, by Sifted’s count, at least a dozen venture scouts based in Europe — several of whom work inside some of Europe’s buzziest AI companies, including Poolside, 11x and Sana.
It’s a sign that a16z is keen to keep tabs on Europe’s AI upstarts — despite announcing the closure of its London office last week, which opened in 2023 and was its first in Europe. The office focused exclusively on crypto and Web3 startups, and was led by general partner Sriram Krishnan; however just two years after opening Krishnan announced he was leaving the firm to take up a new role in Trump’s government. A16z confirmed last week that it would pull out of the UK to refocus on the US crypto industry following Trump’s election.
The firm, which has hundreds of employees in the US, had maintained a small team in London — including crypto investors Jay Drain Jr and Emily Graff and investor relations manager Sasha Small, according to LinkedIn. They will all stay with the firm, and move to the US in the coming months, Andreessen confirmed to Sifted.
But its investment interests are much broader than crypto; its European portfolio includes AI startups Black Forest Labs and Mistral, insurtech Hyperexponential, machine learning startup Gensyn and games startup Ready Player Me.
A16z venture scouts: the deal
Andreessen has dozens of scouts, primarily based in the US, who invest into early-stage deals of their choosing. Scouts Sifted has spoken to do between one to eight deals per month, writing cheques ranging from $10k-25k; many have six-figure budgets, which can be topped up if Andreessen likes the deals they are doing. Andreessen declined to comment on its scout programme.
“We’re given quite a lot of freedom,” says Juhana Peltomaa, cofounder of operator community Operators & Friends. He’s one of a16z’s newest scouts in Europe, along with his cofounders Alex Krass and Michelangelo Pagliara — and has “deployed a handful of tickets” so far.
Scouts submit a short memo on prospective deals to their ‘sponsor’ at Andreessen Horowitz — often the partner who invited them to be a scout — to be approved. There are guidelines as to what they can and can’t invest in; for example, a16z scouts can’t invest directly in NFTs or tokens, and primarily invest at pre-seed and seed. A16z doesn’t ask for ‘information rights’ — ie. updates on how those companies are doing.
Unlike some other VC scout programmes — notably fellow US VC Sequoia’s — a16z doesn’t have an official ‘programme’ as such; the scouts aren’t all introduced to one another, or ‘taught’ about deal-making.
Although it might not be Andreessen Horowitz’s plan to build a community around its scouts, Operators & Friends’s Peltomaa and his cofounders say they’re hoping to build the “missing connection layer” between people like themselves — operators at fast-growing European startups. Since launching a year ago, they’ve held 15 in-person sessions, many of which have been hosted by VCs keen to get access to those operators.
The trio met Andreessen at Helsinki tech event Slush, where they co-hosted a breakfast — they also cohosted a dinner with the firm in London last week, to “help them build their presence in Europe”.
Ari Posner, another scout who was onboarded last December and works at AI startup 11x, has also begun hosting monthly dinners with a16z, along with his 11x colleague and fellow scout Guillaume Roux-Romestaing, to help them meet “top talent” in London. Two or three a16z partners usually attend, he tells Sifted.
For a16z, onboarding scouts “is a way to have eyes on the market,” an a16z scout who asked to remain anonymous tells Sifted. “I doubt it’s a conscious thing that they’ve brought on more scouts in Europe; it’s probably more a sign that there are more and more people who seem to be highly connected in Europe, who it’s in the interest of a16z to keep close.
“It’s a sign that Europe’s a credible place with interesting people.”
Andreessen Horowitz’s venture scouts in Europe
Michelangelo Pagliara, senior bizops associate at Sana, London
Scout since January 2025 [Confirmed]
Juhana Peltomaa, GTM at Pigment, Paris
Scout since January 2025 [Confirmed]
Alex Krass, enterprise solutions GTM at Cargo.one, Berlin
Scout since January 2025 [Confirmed]
Alex Johansson, founding engineer at Tola, Malmo
Scout since December 2024
Ari Posner, GTM at 11x, London
Scout since December 2024 [Confirmed]
Guillaume Roux-Romestaing, partnership lead at 11x, London
Scout since June 2024 [Confirmed]
Alasdair Monk, head of experience at Poolside, London
Scout since March 2024
Christoph Deckert, strategy at Personio, Munich
Scout since December 2023 [Confirmed]
Pippa Lamb, partner at Sweet Capital, London
Scout since October 2023 [Confirmed]
Mathias Adam, freelance designer at BeReal, Brut, Ultrahuman, Paris
Scout since August 2023 [Confirmed]
Timmu Tõke, CEO Ready Player Me, New York/Tallinn
Scout since August 2023 [Confirmed]
Dima Shvets, cofounder of Reface, London
Scout since May 2023
Dann Bibas, GTM consultant, Amsterdam (ex Wise)
Scout since January 2022 [Confirmed]
Former scouts
Maximillian Lehmann, senior vice president at Nium, Amsterdam (ex Adyen)
Scout from December 2022 to December 2024 [Confirmed]
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/a16z-europe-scouts/
