Invest2 publishers3 min readPublished
DOJ's a16z probe puts a venture standard on trial: partners on boards of rival portfolio companies
A nearly year-old interlocking-directorate inquiry names Databricks and Fivetran. The usual remedy is a resignation, which makes a board seat a term of investment worth repricing.
The Investor · Invest desk
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What happened
- Andreessen Horowitz is the focus of a Justice Department antitrust probe over whether its investment partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing artificial intelligence companies, according to people familiar with the matter.
- The investigation is nearly a year old, had not been previously reported, and was opened around the same time as the merger review.
- A firm like a16z does not just write checks: it takes board seats, installs partners as directors, and actively shapes strategy at portfolio companies, creating potential for anticompetitive information sharing when those companies operate in overlapping markets.
- The companies at issue include Databricks Inc. and Fivetran Inc., both backed by Andreessen Horowitz.
- Both Databricks and Fivetran help businesses collect, organize and analyze massive troves of data.
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Why it matters
The Justice Department has spent close to a year investigating whether Andreessen Horowitz's investment partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing artificial intelligence companies, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Fortune [1] [2]. What is exposed here is not one careless directorship but the standard venture template: a firm that takes a board seat with the check, installs a partner as director, and then does it again in an adjacent company [3].
The named pair is Databricks and Fivetran, both backed by the firm and both in the business of helping companies collect, organize and analyze large volumes of data [4] [5]. Co-founder Ben Horowitz sits on the Databricks board; partner Martin Casado sits on Fivetran's [6]. Casado was also a director of dbt Labs, which Fivetran acquired in June [7]. The DOJ reviewed that deal for months after its October announcement and cleared it unconditionally [8], having opened the interlock inquiry around the same time and kept it running after the deal closed [9]. Read plainly, the agency treated the merger and the board question as separate matters and let the second one live [10].
Section 8 of the Clayton Act, passed in 1914, bars a single person from sitting on the boards of two competing companies [11]. The wrinkle is that more than one individual director is at issue, so the firm itself is in the frame; the statute is worded to reach companies as well as individuals and a handful of courts have agreed, which still leaves a16z an avenue to contest any allegation [12].
The remedy history is unglamorous. Under Jonathan Kanter the DOJ pushed directors off boards rather than into court: Ari Emanuel left Live Nation's board in 2021 [13], and directors at more than 10 other companies exited in 2022 and 2023 [14]. Resolving these matters typically means someone resigns from one of the two boards [15]. That is cheap for a fund that wants information rights and expensive for one whose pitch is governance.
The scale explains the attention. Andreessen Horowitz managed $90 billion as of January and has raised a $15 billion fund, its largest, announced in January 2026 [16] [17] [18], or roughly a sixth of assets under management [19]. Its limited partners include sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and university endowments [20]. Databricks is an IPO candidate in the portfolio, and Horowitz holds billions of dollars in potential returns from lead positions dating back to a $14 million round in 2013 [21] [22].
Politics sits on top. Andreessen and Horowitz each donated millions in 2024 to a group aligned with then-candidate Donald Trump [23]; Horowitz later gave $2.5 million to a super PAC supporting Kamala Harris [24]; and Bloomberg News has reported that the firm successfully pushed the administration to remove many AI safety guardrails [25].
Watch three things. The DOJ has made no final decision and the matter could end with no action [26]; spokespeople for Databricks and the department declined to comment, and Andreessen Horowitz and Fivetran did not respond [27]. Accounts of how far along it is diverge: Fortune describes a nearly year-old inquiry, while a summary of Axios reporting says no charges, targets or timelines have emerged and the probe appears preliminary [2] [28]. And the real signal will not be a court filing but a quiet director departure at Databricks or Fivetran, followed by term sheets elsewhere that convert board seats into observer rights.