Behind the firm's $1.776B American Dynamism practice is a category label that pulls defense, energy, and manufacturing startups into one investable frame, with assets under management that are not the same thing as returns.
Andreessen Horowitz has spent roughly four years turning a thesis into a named, fundable category for companies working on U.S. national priorities, with Anduril, SpaceX, and Hadrian as the anchors. On the We the Builders podcast, General Partner David Ulevitch put a number on the bet: about $1.776 billion in dedicated practice capital, on top of the firm's roughly $90 billion in total assets under management.
That sum is the easy part to report. The harder story is what the name signals. "American Dynamism" is the thesis label Ulevitch and Katherine Boyle coined roughly four years ago to pull public safety, aerospace, logistics, national security, defense, manufacturing, and industrialization into a single investable frame. It is not a fund in the legal sense. It is a category the firm argues deserves to be treated as one thing. The named portfolio on the American Dynamism 50 list for 2025 reads as the argument: Anduril, Applied Intuition, Apex Space, Astro Mechanica, Astranis, Base Power, Castelion, Hadrian, Northwood Space, Radiant Nuclear, and SpaceX, alongside newer bets such as Amca and California Forever.
The mechanism behind the name is what podcaster Christopher Lochhead, on the same episode, calls "Category Design." The pitch is not that Andreessen Horowitz arrived first, but that it has reframed the problem better than incumbents in defense procurement, energy, and industrial supply chains. That framing carries a marketing caveat: a category designed by the people writing the checks is, at minimum, a self-fulfilling label. Assets under management in a practice are not the same thing as returns. Lochhead's commentary is labeled analysis, not industry consensus.
What changes once a national-priorities category has a name? The episode walks through a sector map that the name now organizes. Ulevitch and his team argue, in chapter titles on the show, that the new defense-industrial cycle looks like this: rebuilding what they call "the arsenal of democracy"; a hardware-first view, on the thesis that "hardware outperforms software over time"; the coupling of defense with energy and space; the divergence of industrial supply chains; maritime dominance as an expanding market; and venture-backable bets in critical infrastructure. A capital map with a label is easier for a Pentagon program officer, a state energy office, or a sovereign wealth fund to navigate than a hundred unrelated pitch decks. The name is the procurement clue.
The category is also a personal bet by the people running it. Ulevitch previously founded OpenDNS, which Cisco acquired in 2015 for $635 million; he then ran Cisco Security as SVP and GM, a business with about $2.4 billion in annual revenue and more than 5,000 people, per his American Dynamism Fund II announcement on X. The background in enterprise security, not pure venture, is part of the pitch: the practice frames itself as operators who know what procurement looks like inside large institutions. The framing extends beyond defense. A recent Vanity Fair dispatch from a Washington defense-tech conference describes the same cohort now showing up with capital, lobbyists, and a common vocabulary in rooms that historically saw only contractors.
Two caveats worth holding. First, the $1.776 billion figure appears in the source title and the We the Builders chapter heading; the number should be cross-checked against Ulevitch's own Fund II announcement and any a16z disclosure before being treated as confirmed vehicle size. Second, the corpus mixes public-company-adjacent names such as SpaceX with early-stage bets whose outcomes are not yet visible. A practice that holds SpaceX on its roster is, by construction, not a clean read on what the next generation of defense-tech founders can build from scratch.
The next signal to watch is not another fund close. It is whether the frame holds: whether the cohort of named American Dynamism companies starts showing up in actual Pentagon, Department of Energy, and NASA procurement pipelines at scale, and whether other venture firms adopt similarly named theses. A category works when the buyers start speaking the language.