Katie Haun
Founder & CEO, Haun Ventures
Former federal prosecutor who became a16z’s first woman GP, then built a multi-billion-dollar crypto fund.
Katie Haun spent over a decade as a U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor specializing in cybercrime and cryptocurrency, including the Silk Road task force, and established the DOJ’s first digital currency task force.
She joined Andreessen Horowitz in 2018 as its first woman general partner, co-leading and scaling the crypto practice, before leaving in 2021 to found Haun Ventures in 2022.
In 2026 the firm raised $1B across new funds, split evenly between early- and late-stage vehicles, taking reported assets under management to roughly $2.5B — growth that ran against a year in which several other large crypto funds shrank. The second fund extended the mandate beyond crypto and financial services to AI agents.
How she invests
The prosecutorial background is visible in what the firm buys. Haun Ventures has leaned toward business-facing companies designed to work with traditional financial regulation rather than around it — a tilt that reads as excessive caution in a rising market and as underwriting discipline in a falling one. Splitting the 2026 raise evenly between early and late stage is a related choice: it prices the same thesis at two very different points on the risk curve instead of betting the firm on one of them.
What an individual investor can take from it
This is the clearest case here of a career that looked unrelated to investing turning out to be the edge itself. In crypto, regulatory fluency is not a soft skill — it substantially determines which companies survive long enough to matter. The generalisable version deserves to be taken seriously: the domain where you can already tell a serious operator from an unserious one, whatever that domain happens to be, is the only place your judgement is currently worth more than the market’s.
Where the lesson stops
Domain expertise only pays where the domain actually determines outcomes. Regulatory fluency is decisive in crypto and financial services; in many other categories, deep knowledge of the technology tells you very little about whether a company will win, because distribution or timing decides it instead. Establish that your expertise touches the thing that matters in that market before treating it as an edge rather than a comfort.
a16z’s first woman general partner, before building a fund with $2.5B+ under management.
Sources
Facts here reflect public reporting at time of writing — roles and fund affiliations change; verify current details directly with Haun Ventures.