How AI levels the playing field for foreign founders

Andreessen Horowitz has long championed American dynamism, but a U.S. passport is hardly a prerequisite for funding. Gabriel Vasquez, a partner focused on AI applications and the firm’s worldwide investment approach, notes that “44% of our investments in the Apps Fund One and Two have an international founder.” Alongside general partner Angela Strange, Vasquez leads a16z’s Borderless Founder network, a program designed to back immigrant and international entrepreneurs. Their core belief is that transformative companies can emerge anywhere, yet they now argue that foreign founders may actually possess a strategic advantage over their American counterparts.

The U. S. has historically drawn ambitious founders from abroad, but in today’s AI-driven climate, a16z sees those global roots as a greater asset than ever before. “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 shared with TechCrunch ahead of publication. Speaking exclusively with TechCrunch, Vasquez explained how this edge has grown so pronounced that a16z has chosen to “spend more than one million air miles” chasing international dealflow, rather than requiring every startup team to relocate stateside.

This shift is particularly evident in enterprise software, where purchasing behavior outside the U. S. has transformed. “The buyers from countries outside the U. S. were not moving rapidly, and their willingness to pay was very low,” Vasquez said of the historical pattern. That dynamic has reversed sharply “in the last three to five years,” with startups now landing major global corporations as customers, even in markets not traditionally seen as early adopters.

When a16z first encountered international seed-stage startups securing Fortune 500 clients, Vasquez admitted, “we thought this might be an exception, but it was clearly a trend.” Today, examples are plentiful of AI startups abroad signing significant deals early in their lifecycle, a rarity just a few years ago. In Europe, corporations previously engaged with startups only through innovation labs or accelerator programs, rarely committing real budget. Convincing them to become paying customers was so difficult that France launched a dedicated initiative, “I Choose French Tech.” Vasquez credits AI as the catalyst for this change.

The reason, he explains, is that AI forced established players to recognize they must adopt third-party solutions to stay competitive, even in regions where human labor remains inexpensive, such as Latin America. “Software never really picked up in the region, because you were competing with cheap labor.” But with AI agents now operating around the clock and delivering increasing accuracy, they have become standard in customer service and other sectors.

The opportunity is open to anyone, though timing matters. “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. That gap leaves room for a local founder to sell AI solutions to domestic enterprises while maintaining a presence in both their home country and the U. S. “The concept of headquarters is something that is changing a lot; it’s just more fluid,” Vasquez noted, observing that even governments appear to embrace this flexibility.

Poland offers a telling example. The government recently acquired a stake in ElevenLabs, an a16z portfolio company. The voice AI startup operates a subsidiary in Poland rather than its headquarters, yet counts InPost and LOT Polish Airlines among its clients. Its founders, Piotr Dąbkowski and Mateusz Staniszewski, represent Polish AI talent that also features prominently at OpenAI.

For Vasquez, access to skilled talent is the defining factor. “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, by contrast, often tap into rich talent pools that exist well beyond U. S. borders. These talent clusters are precisely why Vasquez spends so much time in the air, frequently landing in Stockholm in search of the next unicorn. Many of Europe’s top AI scaleups are academic spinouts, and venture capitalists are actively pursuing them. The narrative, in some ways, has flipped. As Dealroom founder Yoram Wijngaarde put it: “European talent remains one of America’s biggest startup advantages.”