Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is the focus of a Justice Department antitrust probe over whether its investment partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing artificial intelligence companies, according to people familiar with the matter.
The companies at issue include Databricks Inc., one of the most valuable privately held technology companies in the world, and Fivetran Inc., both backed by the VC firm, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter. Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz serves on the board of Databricks, and partner Martin Casado is a board member of Fivetran. Both companies help businesses collect, organize and analyze massive troves of data.
Casado was also on the board of a similar company dbt labs, which was acquired by Fivetran in June. The Justice Department conducted a months-long review of the deal, first announced in October, said the people, but ultimately cleared it unconditionally.
The nearly year-old investigation, which hasn’t been previously reported, was opened around the same time as the merger review and has continued after the deal was completed, the people said.
Spokespeople for Databricks and the Justice Department declined to comment. Spokespeople for Andreessen Horowitz and Fivetran didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Resolving such investigations typically requires that directors step down from one of the competing boards. And companies targeted by the Biden administration did just that, with directors on some dozen boards, including Live Nation Entertainment Inc. leaving their positions to resolve the conflict.
White House Connections
The investigation of Andreessen Horowitz, which has closely aligned itself with the second Trump administration, is particularly noteworthy. The company has forged ties to the White House and its tech portfolio stands to benefit from the minimal regulatory policies that some of Andreessen Horowitz’s team is pressing in Washington.
Horowitz and the firm’s other co-founder, Marc Andreessen, each donated millions of dollars in 2024 to a group aligned with then presidential candidate Donald Trump. And the firm has been a key voice on AI policy, successfully pushing the administration to remove many safety guardrails on the use of the technology, Bloomberg News has reported. Later in 2024 Horowitz also gave $2.5 million to a super PAC that supported Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Read More: Andreessen Horowitz’s Rising Influence Over Trump-Era AI Policy
The Justice Department hasn’t made any final decisions on how to proceed with the investigation, which could end with no action, the people said.
The investigation also represents a continuation of a key Biden-era focus on a rarely invoked 1914 law against so-called interlocking directorates, where individuals or entities sit on boards of directors for two companies that directly compete with one another.
Under then Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, the DOJ forced directors to resign from a number of boards to resolve such concerns. In 2021 then Endeavor Group Holdings CEO Ari Emanuel stepped down from the board of Live Nation. And in 2022 and 2023 directors from more than 10 other companies exited boards as well.
Competing Boards
In the Andreessen Horowitz probe however, it’s the involvement of the firm itself on competing boards, since more than one individual director is at issue. While the law is worded to apply to companies as well as individuals and a handful of courts have agreed, it could still provide an avenue for the firm to challenge any allegations by the government.
As of January, Andreessen Horowitz had $90 billion in assets under management, making it one of the richest venture capital firms in the world. The firm recently raised a $15 billion fund, its largest haul ever, to invest across the startup ecosystem. Andreessen Horowitz has poured billions into AI upstarts, including backing companies like coding startup Cursor, which was just acquired by SpaceX and voice AI company ElevenLabs. The firm also is a major investor in SpaceX, which went public in June, and has backed OpenAI, which is looking to go public in the near future.
Databricks is another IPO contender within Andreessen Horowitz’s portfolio. Horowitz is sitting on billions of dollars in potential returns due to his continued lead investments in the company, dating back to a $14 million fundraising in 2013. Databricks last week announced $5 billion in funding at a $190 billion valuation.
The post Andreessen Horowitz focus of DOJ probe over board directors appeared first on Fortune.
