In a blog post that lays out a vision for crypto’s future, ranging from a “new financial system” to warnings about “opaque” AI, a16z crypto announced a new $2.2 billion fund. This is the VC firm’s fifth fund and brings the total raised to date to $9.8 billion, it says.

In addition, the fund also promoted its CTO, Eddy Lazzarin, to general partner, bringing the GP investing team to four people. Lazzarin joins Chris Dixon, Ali Yahya, and Guy Wuollet. The fund has backed standout companies like Coinbase, Kalshi, and Solana Foundation.

The timing of this news is a bit ironic, with crypto trading in such a slow period that Coinbase announced on the same day it was laying off 14% of its workforce. March was the slowest trading-volume month across crypto exchanges since November 2023, crypto data and news site CoinGecko reported.

VC investing in crypto startups has cooled, too, landing at nearly $5 billion in the first quarter of 2026, compared to closer to $6 billion in the year-ago quarter, reports DLNews, citing stats from crypto data site DefiLlama.

The a16z crypto partners acknowledge this. They describe how crypto highs draw in investment and a fervor of startups, but that “we’re at one of those quieter moments now,” they write. However, they insist that much of what gets built during a downtime “is usually more useful than it looked at the peak, and more durable than it looked at the trough.”

Hot market or not, there is VC money out there for blockchain-related startups that can woo VCs. The part founders will have to overcome is that some of the biggest crypto VCs are now being seduced by AI startups. This is an area swimming in rising valuations.

For instance, Paradigm, one of the biggest and most prestigious crypto funds, is reportedly working on raising a fresh $1.5 billion fund to expand its thesis into robotics and AI, The Wall Street Journal reported in February. Plus, Y Combinator, which has cranked out many crypto and blockchain-related startups over the years, didn’t ask for any in its most recent “Requests for Startups” list.

Earlier this week, former Andreessen Horowitz investor Katie Haun announced that her crypto-focused firm, Haun, has also raised a new $1 billion fund and will continue to invest in this market. But she’s also looking for AI agent tech as it intersects with crypto/blockchain and fintech.

The latest a16z crypto fund will not be lured away by hotter markets, a spokesperson tells TechCrunch, promising that it will be “dedicated 100% to crypto entrepreneurs.”

Lucid Motors said Tuesday that it’s no longer sure how many EVs it will build or sell this year, as it navigates a transition to a new CEO and a company-wide cost-cutting push.

The company said in February that it planned to build between 25,000 and 27,000 vehicles this year. That’s far from the hundreds of thousands of vehicles that Lucid Motors estimated it would build and sell this year when it went public back in 2021. But it would have represented a significant bump from last year’s figure of around 18,000.

The change to Lucid’s guidance was announced during the company’s first-quarter earnings call by chief financial officer Taoufiq Boussaid. It comes just a few months after the company laid off 12% of its workforce, which TechCrunch first reported in February. Lucid Motors said in a filing Tuesday that those layoffs will cost the company around $40 million in the near term, though it believes the cuts will ultimately save as much as $500 million over the next few years.

Boussaid said the decision to pull Lucid Motors’ guidance for the year was a “governance decision,” and that incoming CEO Silvio Napoli is conducting a review of the business. Boussaid said Lucid Motors expects to provide a “full updated outlook” during the second-quarter earnings call in a few months.

“It’s clear that realizing Lucid’s full potential will require sharper focus and consistent execution, particularly around simplification, prioritization and speed,” Napoli said during the call.

Lucid Motors also shared Tuesday that it had a worse-than-expected first quarter, largely due to a production disruption and a temporary stop-sale that affected Gravity SUV deliveries for 29 days due to problems with a seat supplier.

These problems wound up inflating Lucid Motors’ inventory, and the company said it will have to carefully manage production volume in the near term in order to reduce that glut.

“We are not constrained on capacity. We are constrained by our own discipline not to build inventory ahead of demand. As market conditions develop, we will scale production accordingly,” Boussaid said.

This all comes as Lucid Motors is supposed to start building its first high-volume vehicle this year, priced at under $50,000. The company has said it would begin producing the first EV on this mid-size platform by the end of 2026. On Tuesday, the company kept the focus on next year, saying it “remain[s] on track for production ramp-up of the mid size in 2027.”

Lucid Motors is also planning to launch a robotaxi service with Uber and Nuro by the end of this year, using autonomous versions of its Gravity SUV. Lucid confirmed Tuesday that it remains on track to start building the road-ready versions of those vehicles in the fourth quarter.

Update: This article was updated to clarify that deliveries were disrupted for 29 days.

Companies working on batteries, semiconductors, and medical devices generate vast amounts of data — and much of it ends up scattered across spreadsheets and legacy systems, making it hard to use to improve products or understand failures.

San Francisco-based startup Altara, which just secured $7 million in seed funding, says it has built an AI layer designed to bridge these data gaps and bring fragmented technical information into a single platform. The round was led by Greylock, with participation from Neo, BoxGroup, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Jeff Dean.

Altara was founded in 2025 by Eva Tuecke (pictured right), who previously conducted particle physics research at Fermilab and worked at SpaceX; and Catherine Yeo (pictured left), a former AI engineer at Warp. The two met while studying computer science at Harvard University.

“Imagine if you’re a company building next-generation batteries, and a battery fails during the cell testing in the R&D process,” Yeo said. “A team of engineers has to go in and manually check a lot of different sources of data, anything from their sensor logs to their temperature data, moisture data. They cross-check historical failure reports.”

Scientists and engineers often spend weeks or months on this “scavenger hunt” across a multitude of data sources just to diagnose and resolve failures, she said.

Altara claims that its AI dramatically slashes the time required for this process, condensing weeks of manual data triaging into minutes.

Corinne Riley, a partner at Greylock, compares what Altara is doing in the physical sciences to the role of site reliability engineers in the software world. If a system fails, “an SRE will go in, and they’ll go look at the observability stack of the company,” she said. “Someone pushed a change to the code, and that’s what caused an outage.”

For instance, Greylock-backed Resolve, which is valued at $1.5 billion, uses AI to diagnose software failures. Altara’s vision is to act as the hardware equivalent, determining exactly what went wrong when a battery or a semiconductor fails to perform.

Altara isn’t the only startup using AI to accelerate development in the physical sciences. Startups like Periodic Labs and Radical AI are also tackling scientific research from the ground up. 

Altara is taking a different, much less capital-intensive approach though. Rather than trying to replace decades-old research and manufacturing firms, Altara provides an intelligence layer that plugs into their existing data.

In fact, Greylock’s Riley views AI for physical science as the “next big frontier” and predicts an impending explosion of development in the sector.