That's a wrap on SR007 applications
Applied to speedrun? While you wait to hear back, here are some big ideas from our team you might have missed.
Next week, Tech Week lands in Boston, followed by NYC. If you’re a founder, check out Pitch Day, a live event at the a16z NY offices where selected founders will have the chance to pitch their company and get feedback from a16z investors.
This is our biggest East coast Tech Week yet, with 2,000+ events happening across both cities. Boston is from May 26 to 31 and NYC is right after from June 1 to 7.
Check out the full calendar and build your own personalized schedule here.
The official application window for SR007 has closed! Investors are now reviewing applications and doing followups to select teams for our Summer/Fall cohort.
If you applied and haven’t heard back, hang tight. We’re reviewing apps on a rolling basis and expect to get back to everyone within ~4 weeks from today.
In the meantime, we know many of you are wondering: what goes on behind the scenes while investors are looking at apps? To answer, we hopped in the booth with Kenan Saleh, Emily Bennett, Fareed Mosavat, and Troy Kirwin from the a16z speedrun investing team to talk about:
00:00 - patterns we’re seeing in apps for SR007
04:50 - our process for reviewing apps
08:20 - traction signals we look for
09:10 - on teams that are a little too early for speedrun
14:26 - surprising things we’ve seen in interviews
20:46 - why you SHOULD NOT take vc funds
25:16 - why should founders pick speedrun?
Watch the full roundtable here:
We’ve put out a lot of content over the last month to explain the speedrun program and what we hope to see from applicants.
Scroll down below to hear directly from 18 different partners from the firm as they explain:
How the a16z speedrun program supports founders
The types of startups investors throughout a16z are hoping to invest in
The big ideas our investors are obsessed with in 2026
If you have questions, shoot us a note at sr-team@a16z.com.
How a16z speedrun Supports Founders
Pitching to VCs is stressful. So we’re turning the tables and pitching to you instead.
The a16z speedrun team has a stacked crew of operators to help you build, scale, and launch your business. Hear from five of our partners below as they explain how they give speedrun founders unfair advantages over the competition.
The Global Founders Program helps you build in America
By Tom Hammer (Head of People, a16z speedrun) - X | LinkedIn
30 of the 70 companies in the last Speedrun batch used our Global Founders Program for help navigating visas and immigration. And not all of those founders were based abroad. For founders on H-1B, TN, or a number of other visas currently working in the US, there’s a path to founding a company and having your own startup sponsor you.
The GTM Team kicks down doors to help you scale
By Macy Mills (Head of GTM, a16z speedrun) - X | LinkedIn
What if I told you I had over 50 executive buyers across Fortune 500 companies, who regularly engage with founders. This year we launched Speedrun Insiders. The exact people you’re trying to get in a room, who will actually take meetings, give feedback, and explore real deployments. We already have them lined up for you, ready to engage.
Brand Lab and Launch Lab make your marketing soar
By Lester Chen (Head of Creators, a16z speedrun) - X | LinkedIn
Every early-stage startup needs attention. Your weekend vibecoded website isn't cutting it. You watch videos but don't know how to make one. 'New media' seems distant, inaccessible. You can't tell your story, so others won't either. Here at speedrun, we’ve designed brand, story, and launch programs to help fix this.
The Talent Network helps you hire
By Bella Nazzari (Talent Partner, a16z speedrun) - X | LinkedIn
We’re the team that helps you hire from the moment you get accepted to speedrun, until well after you finish our program. We’re on track to make over 100 placements across our portfolio this year. Founding engineers, designers, marketers, sales, and all of the new job titles coined this year. No referral fees, no agencies. Direct free hires.
The speedrun marketplace unlocks $7M+ in credits
By Emlyn Thompson (Ecosystem Lead, a16z speedrun) - X | LinkedIn
This is the a16z speedrun Marketplace. Your operating stack, curated and pre-negotiated.We’re talking millions in savings across the tools you actually need: banking, AI, infrastructure, cloud. Everything you need, already onboard.
a16z Team Requests for Startups
The speedrun team partners deeply with the investors on other funds at a16z to find, fund, and support startups. Parters from our Bio + Health, Infrastructure & AI, and American Dynamism teams hopped in the studio to talk about the sort of startups they hope to see.
Early-stage skin cancer detection
By Eva Steinman (Investing Partner, a16z Bio + Health) - X | LinkedIn
Getting to a dermatologist takes three to six months, and in rural areas it often simply doesn't happen at all. We understand how to treat early-stage melanoma. The problem is that we are systematically failing to detect it in time.
A space warfighting prime
By Christian Keil (Investing Partner, American Dynamism) - X | LinkedIn
Combine these ingredients: ubiquitous launch, hundreds of billions of assets in space, and increasingly hostile activity from America’s adversaries… and the opportunity is self-evident. We need the ability to defend our valuable assets on orbit, which is why I want to fund a space warfighting prime.
Video intelligence companies
By Jason Cui (Investing Partner, Infrastructure & AI) - X | LinkedIn
Over the past few years, we've seen remarkable advances in video generation, editing, avatars, and creative tooling. An increasingly important problem is teaching machines to search, analyze, reason over, and extract insight from video across massive libraries and live streams alike.
Infinite healthcare apps
By Jay Rughani (Investing Partner, a16z Bio + Health) - X | LinkedIn
Today, we don't have enough healthcare professionals in America. Wait times to see a doctor average over a month. We're short 600,000+ doctors and nurses. And nearly half of the clinicians we do have are burned out, buried in paperwork. This is a math problem. And AI can fix the equation.
Big Ideas from the Investors
The investors on the speedrun team are always keeping an eye out for the next big bottleneck holding back the future. Below are eight big ideas about what the world needs next from startup founders.
Proactive AI agents
By Kenan Saleh (Investing Partner, a16z speedrun) - X | LinkedIn
Today’s AI products are reactive. You give the model a prompt, it responds with an answer. These are useful, but I’m excited about products that take this further and shift the paradigm from “ask to answer” to “observe to act.”
GUIs for agents
By Jonathan Lai (General Partner, a16z speedrun) - X | LinkedIn
We’re still in the MS-DOS era of agents toda: CLI, terminal sessions, file directories deleted by openclaw etc. while a small slice of silicon valley are power users. At speedrun, we’re looking for bold founders excited to bring the power of agents to normies everywhere.
We’re entering a world of infinite output
By Lejla Johnsen (Investing Partner, a16z speedrun) - X | LinkedIn
What would it look like to create tools that train people to attach real probabilities to their beliefs… and see, over time, where they tend to overestimate or underestimate?Or systems that can make decision-making visible, trackable, and improvable?
Come for the agent, stay for the network
By Troy Kirwin (Investing Partner, a16z speedrun) - X | LinkedIn
In the past, suppliers thrived off of the offline nature of these markets with an agentic platform, the demand side can be aggregated and the power balance flipped. You can start to become the interface buyers default to, the channel suppliers need to be on, and the owner of the richest pricing dataset in the industry.
Tools for the 100x solo founder
By Emily Bennett (Investing Partner, a16z speedrun) - X | LinkedIn
For decades, company size has been dictated by coordination costs. If you wanted to grow revenue, you hired people. More customers meant more support reps. More revenue meant more finance and ops. Scale meant headcount. AI is starting to break that relationship. At speedrun, we’re interested in startups building tools that allow a single founder to operate what would previously have required entire teams.
The next great software distribution company
By Josh Lu (General Manager, a16z speedrun) - X | LinkedIn
For the last decade-plus, building a strong software business was mostly a game of scarcity. The hard part was assembling the capital, taste, engineering, and distribution to build one enduring app. The discovery systems we built matched that world: app stores, SEO, search bars, rankings, reviews, ads, marketplaces. AI has blown up these constraints.
Agent-native products are coming
By Fareed Mosavat (Visiting Partner, a16z speedrun) - X | LinkedIn
Every product on the internet was built for a human with eyes, a cursor, and a credit card. Agents have none of those things. Most companies are teaching agents to pretend to be humans. That's a hack. The real opportunity is products designed for agents from scratch.
New UI/UX paradigms
By Marcus Segal (Investing Partner, a16z speedrun) - X | LinkedIn
The hardest part of software used to be building it, but now it's designing it. Hamburger menus, nav bars, buttons, chat fields... None of these were designed for a world where software participates.
And, lastly, if you’re wondering what actually happens after you hit “submit” on your application:
What happens after you apply to speedrun:
By Ryan Rigney (Marketing Partner, a16z speedrun) - X | LinkedIn
We’re looking for amazing founders. What makes you special, what you understand about this market that other people don't, and evidence that you know how to ship: these are the things that make applications stand out. Traction with customers and an already-assembled killer cofounder team go a long way too.
That’s it for this week! For more weekly dives into the world of early stage startups, subscribe below.
Great information. Makes that rejection email sting a little less 😂