Venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz on Wednesday announced a second fund with $650 million to invest in tech startups at seed, venture and growth stages. Andreessen Horowitz has raised nearly $1 billion over the past 16 months, and the new fund will make investments ranging from $50,000 to $50 million.

Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape Communications, teamed with Ben Horowitz, his Netscape colleague, to form Andreessen Horowitz in June 2009. The firm's first fund totaled $300 million.

"Our mission is to invest in the best entrepreneurs building the most important companies," Horowitz said. "As a matter of core philosophy, we invest in companies, not stages -- we're stage-agnostic. This fund will help us continue to support great entrepreneurs in whatever phase they're in as they build quality companies going after the biggest markets."

Tech Start-up Experience

Andreessen Horowitz's portfolio currently holds 28 investments, including Kno, Nicira, Proferi, Rockmelt and Zynga. The firm also led Foursquare's series B round and was among a group of investors that bought part of Skype. The firm focuses on investing in a range of start-ups in the technology sector, including cloud computing, web, mobile and consumer electronics.

Beyond the firm's unique multi-stage investment philosophy, one of its founding principles is to have general partners who are skilled in helping companies at all three stages of development -- seed, venture and growth.

The firm's general partners -- Andreessen, Horowitz and John O'Farrell -- have the entrepreneurial and operational expertise to guide founders through company life cycles, from establishing companies to running them at scale. The partners draw from their track records with companies such as Netscape, Loudcloud/Opsware and Silver Spring Networks.

Indeed, before officially launching their own VC firm, Andreessen and Horowitz were no strangers to investing in start-ups. They acted as angel investors for more than 45 companies, including Aliph (Jawbone), ExtraHop,...

2010-11-04 00:59:16