Martin Casado

Martin Casado was born in Spain and moved to the United States with his family as a young child, living in Colorado, Montana and Arizona. He attended Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where he was initially interested in astronomy and physics before turning to using computers to solve problems. In 2000 he earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering.⁠[1][2]

During college, Casado completed two internships at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, working on atmospheric modeling and simulation programs, and then became a full-time researcher. From 1998 to 2003 he worked at the laboratory on computational simulation and network security research. After the September 11 attacks, he took on technical work for a project assessing the vulnerability of secure networks to attack, an experience that led him to study the programmability and security management of networks further.⁠[1]

After leaving the laboratory, he entered Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry, earning a master’s degree in computer science in 2005 and a Ph.D. in 2007 with research on enterprise network security management. He took part in network architecture research such as Ethane, exploring centralized control of network policy through software.⁠[1][2]

While at Stanford, he also co-founded the IP analytics company Illuminics Systems, which was acquired by Quova in 2006.⁠[3]

In 2007 Casado co-founded Nicira Networks with Nick McKeown and Scott Shenker and served as its chief technology officer. The team commercialized the network control methods from their research and advanced the development of software-defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization.⁠[4]

His research separated network control from data forwarding, used the OpenFlow interface to let external software control switching equipment, and developed corresponding control platforms. His personal research page also lists projects such as NOX, Open vSwitch and Onix, which deal respectively with network control, virtual switching and distributed control platforms.⁠[4][2]

In 2012 VMware acquired Nicira for $1.26 billion. Casado then served at VMware as a Fellow, senior vice president and general manager of the Networking and Security Business Unit. By late 2015 the product business had reached an annualized revenue scale of about $600 million; this figure was the revenue run rate at the time.⁠[5]

Casado received the 2012 ACMAustralian Community MediaAustralian Community Media (ACM) is an Australian regional and rural news publishing group with more than 100 brands, including The Canberra Times; in 2019 Nine sold it to a company controlled by interests associated with Antony Catalano and Thorney Investment Group.Open the full entry Grace Murray Hopper Award in recognition of his contributions to software-defined networking, OpenFlow and open-source networking components. In 2015 he, McKeown and Shenker jointly received the NEC C&C Prize for pioneering research in networking technology and for advancing SDN.⁠[6][4]

On February 24, 2016, Andreessen Horowitz announced that Casado had joined as a general partner. The firm had been Nicira’s first institutional investor; he went on to lead its infrastructure investing practice, applying his experience in networking systems development and company management to investing.⁠[5][3]

As of September 2026, the board seats listed in his official biography included Fivetran, Convex, CursorCursorCursor is the trading name of U.S. AI coding software company Anysphere, Inc. and its namesake coding tool. Founded by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, it began as an AI-native development environment forked from VS Code and later shifted toward agent-centered coding. Its November 2025 Series D valued the company at $29.3 billion post-money; on August 14, 2026, SpaceX completed an all-stock acquisition at an implied equity value of $60 billion, making Cursor a wholly owned subsidiary.Open the full entry, World LabsWorld LabsWorld Labs is a spatial intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco, founded in 2024 by Fei-Fei Li and others. It develops “world models” that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D worlds from text, images and video, as well as technology for robot learning and simulation; its first product is the 3D world generation tool Marble. In September 2026 AMD announced an agreement to acquire World Labs; the transaction has not yet closed.Open the full entry, Kong, Netlify and Ideogram; he had also served on the boards of companies including dbt Labs, Isovalent, Tabular and Parsec.⁠[3]

In 2017 Casado and Brian Shih founded MuralNet to help Native American tribal communities in the United States build broadband networks, beginning with a project in the village of Supai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The organization helps communities obtain equipment and provides network planning, construction, and technical and policy support. Casado serves the organization as a director, founder and chief financial officer, working on funding, partnerships, technology and deployment.⁠[7]

On October 12, 2021, Martin Casado announced that Andreessen Horowitz had led the seed round of build acceleration company EngFlowEngFlowEngFlow is a build acceleration company founded in early 2020 by former Google Bazel team members Helen Altshuler and Ulf Adams. It provides remote caching and remote execution for build systems including Bazel, Chromium, the Android platform and CMake, and Andreessen Horowitz led its seed round and invested in its Series A.Open the full entry, which he called “the Bazel company.”⁠[8]

On January 11, Casado and Peter Levine published an article on “market annealing,” arguing that companies in new markets must keep adjusting their products, sales and market perception, and should not treat finding product-market fit as a one-time event. They stressed that founders should be directly involved in early sales and should scale their teams only after the sales approach has been validated.⁠[9]

On January 19, he, Matt Bornstein and Guido Appenzeller analyzed how value is distributed in generative AI, dividing the industry into three layers: applications, models and infrastructure. The article discussed inference costs, user retention, product differentiation, open-source models and hardware supply, and concluded that it was not yet possible to tell which layer would develop a durable advantage.⁠[10]

On August 22, Casado co-signed a16z’s announcement of its investment in Cursor’s Series A. The team focused on the interaction between programmers and AI models, arguing that code generation needs to be embedded in the actual workflows of maintaining, debugging and modifying software.⁠[11]

On September 13, he and Sarah WangSarah Wang (a16z)Sarah Wang is a venture capitalist and general partner on the growth team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). She joined a16z in 2019 and leads growth-stage investments in AI, enterprise applications and infrastructure, having invested in companies including Character.AI, Wiz, Cursor, Temporal and Exa.Open the full entry announced an investment in World Labs, co-founded by Fei-Fei LiFei-Fei LiFei-Fei Li is an American computer scientist, a professor of computer science at Stanford University and founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and the co-founder and CEO of the spatial intelligence company World Labs. She led the creation of ImageNet and has served as a vice president at Google and chief scientist of Google Cloud, as well as an independent director of Twitter. Since 2026, she has served as senior advisor on artificial intelligence to Stanford’s president and co-chair of the HAI advisory council.Open the full entry and others. The announcement described the company’s focus on spatial intelligence and 3D world models, and noted that Casado was spending time in the team’s office to help connect research and product development.⁠[12]

In a signed article, Casado argued that regulation should be based on the marginal risks that artificial intelligence introduces compared with existing computing systems. He held that research should be used to identify which risks genuinely require new rules, while avoiding excessive restrictions on innovation; these are his personal policy positions.⁠[13]

In 2025, “The Design and Implementation of Open vSwitch,” a paper Casado co-authored and originally published in 2015, received the NSDI Test of Time Award. In 2026, “Network Virtualization in Multi-tenant Datacenters,” which he co-authored and which was published in 2014, also received the same kind of award.⁠[14]

On August 17, it was reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that the U.S. Department of Justice was examining a16z investment partners’ service on the boards of competing companies, including Ben HorowitzBen HorowitzBen Horowitz is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and business author who co-founded Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with Marc Andreessen in 2009. He previously led Loudcloud’s transition into Opsware and its 2007 sale to Hewlett-Packard. His writing and investing address startup management, organizational culture and the relationship between technology and cultural industries.Open the full entry’s seat at Databricks and Casado’s seat at Fivetran. These are reports of an inquiry, not a finding of wrongdoing.⁠[15][16]

On August 28, Casado, Ben Horowitz, Raghu Raghuram, David Ulevitch and David GeorgeDavid George (a16z)David George is a venture capitalist and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). After joining from General Atlantic in 2019, he built and leads a16z’s growth-stage investing practice, leading or participating in investments in companies such as SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, Roblox and Databricks.Open the full entry jointly announced that a16z had raised the $1.1 billion Machine Age Fund. The fund targets the infrastructure that AI requires, including chips, storage, networking, data centers and robotics; the announcement cited his networking and data center experience as part of the team’s background for hardware investing.⁠[17]

On October 9, 2026, Casado and Jennifer Li, Sarah Wang, Marc AndreessenMarc AndreessenMarc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While in college he helped develop the graphical web browser Mosaic, then co-founded Netscape and Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware), and has long served as a director of Meta; he has also published essays such as “Why Software Is Eating the World.”Open the full entry and Ben Horowitz published a joint post on the a16z website announcing that a16z was leading the investment in TypeSafe AITypeSafe AITypeSafe AI is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco, founded in 2024, that develops “System One” models which software calls directly and which output structured judgments with probabilities rather than text; its first public model is Jev. The company came out of stealth on September 15, 2026, announcing a $40 million seed round led by DCVC, and on October 9 of the same year announced an $870 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $7.5 billion valuation.Open the full entry. The same day, TypeSafe AI announced a Series A led by a16z, with participation from Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry, existing investor DCVCDCVCDCVC (Data Collective) is an American deep tech venture capital firm founded in 2010 by Matt Ocko and Zachary Bogue, with offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco, California. It invests in companies that use computing and AI to solve real-world problems in fields such as energy, climate, biomedicine, defense, space, and industry; as of October 2026 it had more than $4 billion in assets under management across 13 funds.Open the full entry and a number of angel investors, raising $870 million at a $7.5 billion valuation; the company also announced that Casado was joining its board.⁠[18][18][19][19]

The post called the launch of TypeSafe’s Jev model the biggest narrative violation they had seen that year and described Jev as the fastest-growing model they had ever seen, reaching 1 trillion tokens generated in just three days after launch. The authors argued that while AI is very good at writing software like a human at superhuman speed, it has been far harder to integrate into code; the real economic unlock, they wrote, should be that all software is naturally imbued with the intelligence of the latest models, at performance and cost that fit traditional software economics. They called this the “Jev-ons paradox”: make intelligence cheap enough to call anywhere, and it gets called everywhere.⁠[18][18][18][18][18]

The authors said that, like TypeSafe, they believe the future of SaaS and software is bright, and that AI should make software more powerful rather than just automate the recreation of existing software; they said they shared the view of TypeSafe founder and CEO Diogo Almeida that the true bitter lesson is not necessarily about building a new being, but about returning power to builders by giving them the primitives of intelligence and letting them unleash their imagination. The post closed with the line “Software continues to eat the world.”⁠[18][18][18][20][18]

Northern Arizona University: Casado’s undergraduate alma mater; official website: https://nau.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2][21]

Stanford University: where he earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science and conducted networking research; official website: https://www.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2][22]

VMware: the company where he ran the networking and security business after it acquired Nicira; official website: https://www.vmware.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5][23]

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z): the firm where he is a general partner leading infrastructure investing; official website: https://a16z.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3][24]

MuralNet: the nonprofit networking organization he co-founded; official website: https://www.muralnet.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

His personal homepage is https://yuba.stanford.edu/~casado/ (opens in a new window), and his X account is https://x.com/martin_casado (opens in a new window).⁠[2][3]