Andreessen Horowitz has ramped up its venture scout presence across Europe to at least 21 active scouts—one of the largest structured scout deployments by a U.S.-based fund in the region—despite closing its London crypto-focused office early last year. Scouts operate in Sweden, France, Germany, Estonia, the U.K., and Amsterdam, including operators like Pippa Lamb (partner at Sweet Capital) and Guillaume Roux-Romestaing (11x). The expansion marks a strategic shift from office-based presence to a distributed network.
A16z scouts execute up to eight deals per year, writing checks between $10,000 and $25,000 per investment, targeting pre-seed and seed-stage startups. The firm recruits active angel investors with strong networks rather than newcomers, using them to surface early-stage deals closer to the ground than traditional offices could. Recent examples include a $2.3 million pre-seed into Dentio, a Swedish AI startup that automates administrative work for dental practices, sourced through a16z partner Gabriel Vasquez's deep Stockholm ecosystem work.
The scout model lets a16z identify emerging companies as early as local funds might, leveraging relationships with top founders like Fredrik Hjelm (Voi) and Johannes Schildt (Kry) who double as scouts. This distributed approach cuts through the cost of maintaining regional offices while maintaining access to early deal flow and ecosystem intelligence.
For founders: A16z's European scout network represents a significant shift in early-stage capital availability outside major tech hubs. Scouts are actively sourcing from incubators and founder networks (e.g., Stockholm School of Economics' SSE Business Lab), making proximity to established tech ecosystems a deal-flow advantage. The $10–25K check size targets pre-seed founders not yet ready for institutional rounds.