Forty-four percent. That’s the share of investments in Andreessen Horowitz‘s Apps Fund One and Two that have an international founder, according to Gabriel Vasquez, a partner focused on AI apps and the firm’s global investment strategy.
For a firm best known for its American dynamism thesis, that number does some work. A U.S. passport isn’t a requirement here. And a16z’s argument now goes further than “we’re open to anyone”: the firm thinks founders from outside the U.S. are holding a better hand than their American peers.
The pitch, in a sentence
“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 to which TechCrunch had early access.
Angela Strange, a general partner at the firm, runs a16z’s Borderless Founder network alongside Vasquez. It’s an initiative built to support immigrant and international founders, and it started from the familiar premise that great companies could be born anywhere. The newer part is the claim that geography outside the U.S. is now an asset rather than a tax.
Vasquez put a cost on how seriously a16z takes this. The firm is willing to “spend more than one million air miles” chasing international dealflow, he told TechCrunch, instead of insisting every team relocate to the U.S.
What changed was who’s buying
The old pattern was brutal for anyone selling enterprise software abroad. “The buyers from countries outside the U.S. were not moving rapidly, and their willingness to pay was very low,” Vasquez said.
That shifted “in the last three to five years,” he said, to the point where startups can now land major companies worldwide as customers, including in markets nobody would call cutting edge.
The tell came from seed-stage companies. When a16z started hearing from international startups at that stage working with Fortune 500 companies, “we thought this might be an exception, but it was clearly a trend,” Vasquez said.
He’s right that this was rare not long ago. In Europe especially, corporations engaged with startups through open innovation programs and accelerators, and rarely with the actual checkbook. Converting them into paying customers was hard enough that France launched a dedicated initiative, “I Choose French Tech.”
Why cheap labor stopped being a moat
Vasquez credits AI with forcing the change. Legacy players concluded they’d have to buy third-party solutions to stay competitive, even in regions where human labor is still affordable.
Latin America is his example. “Software never really picked up in the region, because you were competing with cheap labor,” he said. Now AI agents are “always on” and increasingly accurate, and they’ve become commonplace in customer service and elsewhere.
The opening this creates is a timing gap, not a technology gap. “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.
Which leaves room for a local founder to sell an AI product to companies at home while splitting time between there and the U.S. “The concept of headquarters is something that is changing a lot; it’s just more fluid,” Vasquez said. Governments, he noted, seem to be reaching the same conclusion.
Poland bought into a company that isn’t headquartered there
Poland recently took a stake in a16z portfolio company ElevenLabs. The voice AI startup only has a subsidiary in the country, not its headquarters. Its customers include InPost and LOT Polish Airlines, and its founders, Piotr Dąbkowski and Mateusz Staniszewski, are two examples of Polish talent in AI, a group also strongly present at OpenAI.
That’s the fluid-headquarters thesis with a state check attached to it.
The hiring math is the real edge
Talent is where Vasquez’s argument gets least abstract. “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 said.
International founders are frequently hiring from pools those two aren’t fishing in. That’s a concrete cost advantage, and it’s the part of this thesis that doesn’t depend on anyone’s read of buying cycles.
It’s also why Vasquez keeps boarding planes, often to Stockholm, looking for the next unicorn. Some of the strongest AI scaleups are European academic spinouts, and VCs are chasing them.
Which flips the framing entirely. To quote Dealroom founder Yoram Wijngaarde: “European talent remains one of America’s biggest startup advantages.”
