Counsyl co-founder Balaji Srinivasan joins VC firm Andreessen Horowitz as general partner

Balaji Srinivasan has joined Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz as a general partner. Prior to joining the VC firm, he was co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) at Counsyl, where he developed a new pre-pregnancy genomic test for a variety of heritable diseases.

He is also a lecturer in the departments of statistics and computer science at Stanford University (the US). Prior to setting up Counsyl, Srinivasan obtained BS, MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and an MS degree in chemical engineering, all from Stanford.

"As a general partner, Srinivasan will be leading investments and joining boards on behalf of Andreessen Horowitz. While broadly interested in technology in general, he's particularly enthusiastic about 'real world' applications where digital bits interface with physical atoms and substantive problems, such as quantified self (healthcare), MOOCs/edtech (education), Bitcoin (finance), drones and 3D printing," wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder, Andreessen Horowitz, in an official company blog post.

Andreessen Horowitz is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm with $2.7 billion under management. Founded in 2009 by Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the firm invests in both early stage startups and established growth companies across industries like mobile, gaming, social, e-commerce, education and enterprise IT (including cloud computing, security, and SaaS). The firm's investments include Skype (acquired by Microsoft), Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Jawbone and  Foursquare.

Apart from Srinivasan, other Indian-origin partners at the firm include Ramu Arunachalam, Ashvin Bachireddy and Zal Bilimoria.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)