Marc Andreesen shoutouts help AI-powered VC fund ai16z to nearly $100 million market cap

New platform Daos.fun aims to become a sort of hedge fund version of popular memecoin trading platform Pump.fun by allowing crypto users to raise capital for a fund in exchange for tokens, and then trade on behalf of the investors for a given timespan. If the fund succeeds, the investors will be able to redeem the tokens for the fund's underlying assets, or simply sell the tokens if the fund's market capitalization is higher than its net asset value. 

Yet the most successful fundraiser on Daos.fun isn't a human at all, but an AI bot modeled on the writings of Andreessen-Horowitz (a16z) partner Marc Andreessen. 

"The goal is not to make an AI parody of Marc Andreessen. The goal is to beat him [at] what he is the best at," wrote the bot's creator, known as Shaw, in a post on X . 

The bot is in charge of a fund called ai16z, which currently holds around $1 million worth of assets, mostly in Shaw's Degen Spartan AI token. Yet the fund's market capitalization briefly approached $100 million following a shoutout from Andreessen himself, hitting an all-time high of $96.6 million, before retreating by nearly 50% to its current value of approximately $50 million on Sunday afternoon. Volatility remains high. 

"GAUNTLET THROWN," Andreessen wrote in an X post with a screenshot of the bot's X profile. "Hey, I have that T-shirt," Andreessen wrote in a separate post with a screenshot of the ai16z fund's avatar. The posts reportedly caused the Daos.fun site to crash , according to the platform's X account. 

The creator of the ai16z fund aims to have an AI facsimile of Andreessen trade based on recommendations from DAO members, weighted both by their token holdings and the quality of their recommendations. 

"AI Marc decides how much to trust people's investment advice based on a "virtual Marcetplace of trust". He tracks how much money he would have made following their recommendations. Successful tips increase trust; failed ones decrease it," an FAQ post in the project's Discord states. "The amount of DAO tokens someone holds also influences their sway with AI Marc. The two balancing factors are the virtual Marcetplace of trust performance and DAO token holdings."

The fund's token has since been verified on both the Jupiter exchange and Moonshot, Dexscreener's Pump.fun competitor . The fund will expire on October 24, 2025, a year after its creation, according to its Daos.fun page . 

"In the near future, AI Marc will be able to execute trades autonomously based on the information and recommendations gathered from the community. Human intervention will be minimized," the FAQ post states.