AI flips the advantage for foreign founders

Andreessen Horowitz has built a reputation around its American dynamism thesis, but the firm's latest investment pattern suggests that a U.S. passport is no longer a prerequisite for backing the next big AI company. Gabriel Vasquez, a partner focused on AI apps and global investment strategy, told TechCrunch that 44% of investments in the firm's Apps Fund One and Two have an international founder.

Borderless Founder network

Vasquez, along with general partner Angela Strange, leads a16z's Borderless Founder network, an initiative supporting immigrant and international founders. The program's premise is that great companies can emerge anywhere, but the partners now argue that foreign entrepreneurs hold a distinct edge over their American counterparts.

This shift is tied directly to the rise of AI. In a post to which TechCrunch had early access, Strange and Vasquez wrote, "There is now an advantage to having one foot in your home country, and one foot in Silicon Valley."

Air miles for global deals

The advantage has become significant enough that a16z is willing to "spend more than one million air miles" to pursue international dealflow, rather than requiring every founding team to relocate to the U.S., Vasquez explained.

For enterprise startups, the change is notable in buying patterns. "The buyers from countries outside the U.S. were not moving rapidly, and their willingness to pay was very low," Vasquez said of the old dynamic. But that has reversed dramatically "in the last three to five years," with startups now winning major companies worldwide as customers, even in less established markets.

Fortune 500 clients early

When a16z began seeing international seed-stage startups land Fortune 500 clients, "we thought this might be an exception, but it was clearly a trend," Vasquez said. Examples now abound of international AI startups signing major clients early on, a rarity just a few years ago.

In Europe, corporations previously engaged startups only through open innovation programs and accelerators, rarely with their main budgets. Turning them into paying customers was so difficult that France launched an initiative, "I Choose French Tech." But Vasquez credits AI as the catalyst for change.

AI's role in closing deals

AI made legacy players realize they must buy third-party solutions to stay competitive, even in regions with affordable human labor, such as Latin America. "Software never really picked up in the region, because you were competing with cheap labor," Vasquez said. Now that AI agents are "always on" and increasingly accurate, they are common in customer service and other business functions.

The opportunity is open to others as well. "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. This opens the door for a local founder to sell AI solutions to companies in their own country while splitting time between home and the U.S.

Headquarters become fluid

The traditional concept of headquarters is evolving. "The concept of headquarters is something that is changing a lot; it's just more fluid," Vasquez said, noting that even governments appear to adopt this view. A case in point: Poland recently took a stake in a16z-backed voice AI startup ElevenLabs, which has only a subsidiary in the country, not its headquarters. Its customers include InPost and LOT Polish Airlines, and its founders, Piotr Dąbkowski and Mateusz Staniszewski, represent Polish AI talent, also strongly present at OpenAI.

Vasquez sees access to talent as a key differentiator. "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." International founders often tap into talent pools outside the U.S., which has led Vasquez to spend considerable time on planes — frequently in Stockholm — in search of the next unicorn. Some of the top AI scaleups are European academic spinouts, and VCs are pursuing them actively.

Why this matters for startups

This trend suggests that the venture capital playbook, historically centered on funding companies that relocate to Silicon Valley, is adapting to a world where AI success can be built from anywhere. For founders outside the U.S., it could mean easier access to capital and customers than in previous cycles. For American startups, the competition for global AI markets may intensify as international players gain momentum, backed by investors who are now actively seeking them out. The shift also suggests that the flow of talent and ideas may become more bidirectional, with Europe and other regions increasingly seen as sources of AI innovation rather than just markets for U.S. products.