Casado: AI venture rounds now routinely require complex strategic compute contracts
Martin Casado · Inside AI’s $10B+ Capital Flywheel — Martin Casado & Sarah Wang of a16z · Feb 19, 2026 · at 2:59
a16z General Partner Martin Casado discusses how financing structures for AI companies have fundamentally shifted from straightforward equity checks to complex compute deals.
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“Like in the past, if you did a series A or a series B, like whatever, you're writing a 20 to a sixty million dollar check and you call it a day. Now you normally have financial investors or strategic investors, and then the strategic portion always still goes with like these kind of large compute contracts, which can take months to do.”
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