Everyone assumes CRM usage and AI adoption are mutually exclusive. But our GTM survey shows the opposite: 87% of reps say daily usage stayed the same or went up. Agents auto-enriching and referencing the DB have turned it into one input for the new system of intelligence.

AI is driving so much efficiency in GTM that sales leaders are expecting to increase headcount as they use more AI. As is so often the case, technology grows the whole pie, and there ends up being more for humans to work on.

Salesforce and HubSpot are supposed to be the least disruptable companies in enterprise software. @GioAhern, @aleximm, and I argue their databases aren't going anywhere — but a new layer is forming above them: the system of intelligence that reads, reasons, and acts across the stack. The CRM doesn't shrink to make room. Software just gets a bigger job to do — and that's where the next decade of GTM value gets built.

Today, we're dropping our first mini-documentary that highlights our world tour. 80% of our paid users live outside America so it was a no-brainer to make this world tour happen. It's why we invest in localizing our product, run meetups in different countries, and sprinted to make this world tour happen. Instead of putting budget towards a traditional marketing campaign, the team and I got plane tickets to meet our massive global community. 3 continents. 7 events. 600 people we met face to face. There's an energy you feel on on the road that doesn't show up on a dashboard or a Zoom call. People hanging out two hours after a demo ended. Conversations switching languages mid-sentence. Someone's eyes lighting up when they try a new feature that can visualize their idea. Each event was an excuse to experience the small stuff, and seeing the community in real life is a reminder of who we build for. I feel lucky to have such an incredible team, community, and company that lets us do things like this.

Very few founders have built and scaled a vertically integrated hardware company in the modern era. @RJScaringe is one of them. At Mind, he’s building the robotics partner @Rivian wanted but couldn’t find. We believe robotics is just starting to enter its compounding phase. The teams that integrate intelligence, hardware, and deployment into a coherent industrial platform will define the next generation of enduring companies. Real world deployment is not the final step; it forces clarity in every step, from research to reliability. Mind is setting out to build that platform. We are incredibly excited to partner with RJ and the entire Mind team. @DavidGeorge83 @RaghuRaghuram @jamiedsully @espricewright @JacobZietek @appenz

Anshul Sadana helped build Arista into the defining networking company of the last era. Now he and the @nexthopai team, which is one of the strongest hardware and software teams in the industry, are building the networking company for the AI era. Building a networking company that can serve hyperscalers at this scale requires getting everything right: the hardware, the software, the relationships, and the pace of execution. It’s why companies like this almost never get started. It’s also why, when they do, they can become generational. Excited to invest in Nexthop’s Series B. More on why we invested here:

"Gamma Everywhere" is our first-ever world tour and it's happening in two weeks. Gamma has a massive global user base, so the team and I are heading to three cities around the world to meet our users and partners. We have a bunch of events lined up to connect and share with the community about what we've been working on. Our stops: Seoul — March 16-18 London — March 20-23 São Paulo — March 25-26 Each city will have hands-on workshops where you can build with Gamma's newest features alongside power users and local creators, plus an evening experiential event to celebrate with our team and community. Good ideas are everywhere. So is Gamma. Come find us!

Excited to be leading Kavak’s Series F! In 2017, CEO @carlosjgarciao sent an email to his executive team with the subject line “Let’s hire robots!!!” envisioning a future where Kavak would accomplish 1000x more with automation than humans could do alone. That’s how canny their team is. Building a profitable used-car marketplace in a developing market is very hard, and Kavak essentially had to build 10 companies in one to make up for missing infrastructure. Today they operate profitably across Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and the GCC region. They’ve now rebuilt the company to answer every problem with an AI-first approach. Atoms (vehicle sales) + bits (AI agents) = Kavak is well positioned to be one of the big beneficiaries of the AI revolution. Proud to be partnering with Kavak in our first large, late-stage investment in the region. @santiago__rdz @GEVS94 @a16z

Thrilled to be leading @temporalio's Series D. Agents have grown up jobs now. They’re moving data, writing + deploying code, updating records, and coordinating multi-tool, multi-step processes. It’s an exciting time…and a nerve-wracking one. Durable execution is higher stakes than ever. Temporal is the execution layer for software: handling retries, state, recovery, and replay so long-running agents actually work in production. @OpenAI, @Replit, @Lovable, @stripe, @AbridgeHQ (and many more) already rely on them because they are N of 1. Excited to partner with distributed systems legends @SamarAtTemporal and @mfateev as they build the backbone of the agentic era. More on why we invested:

When we asked leading AI companies what they were using as foundational infrastructure, one name kept popping up over and over again. It is the same one that has been powering mission-critical workflows for large enterprises and digital natives. @temporalio Temporal is building the execution layer to power workflows at scale reliably, an undeniable need as agents move from experiments to production. As leading minds that have been pushing the frontier in this space for over a decade, there are no two people better in the world to tackle this problem than @SamaratTemporal and @mfateev, and we @a16z are excited to lead their Series D. More from our team:

Congratulations to @DecagonAI on raising their Series D! We at @a16z are beyond excited to quadruple down on our partnership and continue to support them as they bring concierge AI to the world. It's been a huge privilege to work with @thejessezhang and @AshwinSreenivas since Day 0, when they met at an a16z retreat and we led the seed at inception. We always knew they were special, and it's been incredible to watch them grow from 2 founders with an idea to a leading enterprise AI business partnering with the best companies in the world — from the Fortune 100 (financial services, travel, healthcare, retail, and more) to the most savvy tech companies. Even more rewarding has been seeing the world-class caliber team and the incredible culture Decagon has built. Let's go Decagon!!!! @sarahdingwang @steph_zhang PS we took this photo below at an event in early 2025, where we were celebrating an important Decagon milestone. I promised to take the whole team to dinner if they hit the milestone, and they more than blew past that goal and have been doing so ever since 😃

Excited to share that @DecagonAI has raised $250M in Series D funding. Our mission is to enable every business to deliver truly concierge customer experiences. Customer support should feel informed, proactive, and personal. If you’re the customer of something, it should feel like you’re the only one. That philosophy has shaped the platform we’ve been building. Over the past year, we’ve shipped major improvements to our AI agents across every channel, expanded our testing and analytics suite, and continued to deliver the enterprise reliability needed to support high-stakes customer interactions at scale. Read more on the round in my blog with Jesse below.

Excited to share that @DecagonAI has raised a Series D, tripling our valuation to $4.5B in less than six months! Our funding is a testament to how a fundamentally different approach to product can win vs the incumbent strategies. From the beginning, our focus has been to empower every company to deliver concierge customer experiences. If you’re a customer of something, support should feel personal and proactive. It should feel like the company knows you and can actually help at any time. That’s the standard we’re setting.

Decagon has raised an additional $250 million, tripling our valuation to $4.5 billion in less than six months. We’re on a mission to help every company create concierge customer experiences. We believe every customer deserves support that is personal, proactive, and always there. If you’re the customer of something, it should feel like you’re the only one, 24/7. This round was co-led by new investors @CoatueMGMT and @IndexVentures, with participation from @Chemistry, @Definition_Cap, and @StarwoodCapGrp. It also includes continued support from @a16z, @A_StarVC , @Accel, @AvraCap, @BainCapVC , @EladGil, @ForerunnerVC, and @RibbitCapital. Read more on the raise and what we’re building next in our blog below.

Dropping a new AI benchmark: TetrisBench and a human vs AI Tetris arena 🕹️ See how you rank against the frontier models. Only 1 human has beaten a model so far, so try it out be the 2nd! Stats so far: Opus 4.5 > GPT5.2 > Sonnet > Grok > most humans 🧵

🚨a16z is back with this year's edition of Big Ideas! Here's mine: 2026 will see the shift from designing for humans to designing for agents. As agents become the interface to the web, optimization moves from visual hierarchy to machine legibility. Check out more big ideas from the a16z team 👇