Prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, an investor in tech firms such as Stripe Inc. and Databricks Inc., today said it has raised $9 billion for three new funds.

The largest of the new investment vehicles, dubbed the Growth fund, is launching with $5 billion in initial capital. It’s being rolled out alongside the $1.5 billion Bio fund and the $2.5 billion Venture fund.

Andreessen Horowitz co-founder and General Partner Ben Horowitz (pictured) wrote in a blog post that the firm will be “writing checks as small as $25,000 and up to hundreds of millions of dollars.” When the firm launched two previous funds in 2020, it disclosed that it had nearly $16.5 billion in assets under management at the time. The additional $9 billion Andreessen Horowitz has raised will enable the firm to expand its portfolio even further.  

“One might ask: ‘Why invest $9B in a brand new set of technology companies?’ Our answer begins with one of the firm’s core cultural values: We believe in the future and we bet the firm that way,” Horowitz wrote today. 

Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s highest-profile venture capital firms, has backed many major enterprise technology companies since launching in 2009. A $100 million investment in GitHub reportedly turned into a more than $1 billion return for the firm after Microsoft Corp. acquired the code hosting platform in 2018.  Andreessen Horowitz’s other investments include big names such as publicly-traded PagerDuty Inc. and Databricks, the data analytics startup recently valued at $38 billion.

Andreessen Horowitz has also been active beyond the enterprise technology market. The firm counts Airbnb Inc., Twitter Inc. and $95 billion payments processing giant Stripe among its investments.

That $1.5 billion of the $9 billion in new capital raised by Andreessen Horowitz will go to the new Bio fund underscores its growing focus on the healthcare sector. The firm has backed dozens of startups in segments such as biotechnology and healthcare delivery. The new Bio fund will enable Andreessen Horowitz to double down on its investment strategy in these areas.

Today’s announcement of the three new funds comes only months after Andreessen Horowitz launched a separate $400 million seed fund to back seed-stage startups. The firm disclosed at the time that seed funding rounds have as recently been accounting for about half of its investments. Earlier in 2021, Andreessen Horowitz raised $2.2 billion for a fund focused on blockchain and cryptocurrency. 

Worldwide venture investments reached $643 billion in 2021, according to Crunchbase research, a 92% year-over-year increase from 2020. An average of 10 new unicorn startups valued at $1 billion or more were minted every week last year. Startups in the financial services sector raised the most funding, followed by healthcare, e-commerce and transportation companies.

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