a16z says AI is giving foreign founders an edge

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) partner Gabriel Vasquez, who focuses on AI apps and the firm’s global investment strategy, says 44% of its investments in the Apps Fund One and Two have an international founder. Together with general partner Angela Strange, he is driving the firm’s Borderless Founder network, an initiative supporting immigrant and international founders built on the premise that great companies can start anywhere — and that foreign entrepreneurs now hold an edge over their American peers. The firm says it now spends more than one million air miles chasing international deal flow rather than requiring every team to relocate to the U.S.

Vasquez traces the shift to changed enterprise buying patterns outside the U.S. Historically, corporations abroad — particularly in Europe — engaged with startups mainly through open-innovation programs and accelerators rather than as paying customers; France even launched a dedicated initiative, “I Choose French Tech,” to push its companies to actually buy from startups. In Latin America, software adoption lagged because it had to compete with cheap labor. Vasquez says AI changed that calculus: legacy players now see buying third-party AI tools as necessary to stay competitive, and “always on” AI agents have become common in customer service and beyond. In the last three to five years, a16z has watched international seed-stage startups land Fortune 500 customers — a pattern Vasquez says he first assumed was an exception before concluding it was a trend.

Vasquez argues that American startups, despite their speed, can’t yet serve the entire market from the start, leaving room for local founders to sell AI to companies in their own countries while splitting time with the U.S. Case in point: Poland recently took a stake in a16z portfolio company ElevenLabs, the voice AI startup founded by Poles Piotr Dąbkowski and Mateusz Staniszewski, whose customers include InPost and LOT Polish Airlines — even though ElevenLabs’ headquarters isn’t in Poland, only a subsidiary. Talent access is another differentiator, Vasquez says: with Silicon Valley recruiting made harder by well-funded rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI, international founders can draw on talent elsewhere, including in hubs like Stockholm, where some of Europe’s top AI scaleups have emerged as academic spinouts.

Why it matters

For founders building from Latin America, a16z’s thesis suggests staying rooted at home while serving global enterprise customers is no longer a fundraising liability — it may be exactly what gets a U.S. VC’s attention, especially as AI-driven demand for third-party software reaches markets where cheap labor once made it unnecessary.