Andreessen Horowitz raises $US1.5b

Crisis? What crisis?

High profile VC firm Andreessen Horowitz has secured $US1.5 billion in new funding. The new cash brings the total funding under its management to $US2.7 billion.

The company has been boasting that the serious chunk of change took a mere three weeks to raise the funding, and another six weeks to complete the formalities.

The in-trend VC firm has had its hand in investing, in various stages, a bunch of hot young digital darlings about town including Facebook, Airbnb, Foursquare, Pinterest, Skype, Twitter and Zynga.

In a detailed blog post, Ben Horowitz said the group's Midas touch hinges on building an exceptional and broad network of people from financiers to engineers, and training up entrpreneuers into "the best possible CEOs possible".

“We are uniquely positioned to help the greatest technology entrepreneurs in the world build the best technology companies in the world, and that’s just what we’re going to do,” he wrote.

The well-connected social networkers claim that in 2011, they hosted over 600 portfolio presentations to corporate customers and partners at their office in Menlo Park. These presentations resulted in more than 3,000 introductions between portfolio companies and prospective Fortune 500/Global 2000 senior executives.

“We’ve built relationships with over 4,000 engineers, designers and product managers, and we’ve made more than 1,300 introductions to our portfolio companies, resulting in 130 hires within the portfolio. We added over 550 executives to our network in 2011 and made more than 300 executive introductions to our portfolio companies. We’ve had nearly 400 interactions with media on behalf of our portfolio companies,” Horowitz adds. ®