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For several years, venture capital firms have been cagey about whether they have raised money from Saudi Arabia, following the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in one of the country’s consulates. The Saudis, for their part, are no longer keeping quiet.

The venture arm of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, the country’s $620 billion sovereign wealth fund, has begun disclosing on its website its partnerships with nearly 40 U.S. VC firms and a handful of international funds. Among the relationships disclosed by the Saudi venture arm—known as Sanabil Investments—are connections to marquee investment firms Andreesseen Horowitz, Coatue Management, Craft Ventures and Insight Partners.

It couldn’t be learned when Sanabil made its investments in the venture funds or when it began disclosing the relationships on its website. Some of the venture funds, such as Uncorrelated and Treasury, were founded only recently. Venture firms typically won’t discuss the investors, known as limited partners, that they raise money from.

There have long been deep connections between Silicon Valley and Saudi Arabia, which has sought to diversify its economy away from oil while elevating its global influence. The country’s sovereign wealth fund was a big backer of SoftBank’s Vision Fund and has made a string of direct investments in tech companies, including an eye-popping $3.5 billion it put into Uber in 2016. It was also a big backer of the private equity firm Blackstone. And in April 2018, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, made a widely publicized visit to Silicon Valley, meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

But later in 2018, after a team of Saudi operatives killed Khashoggi in a Saudi consulate in Turkey, some high-profile figures in tech vowed never to work with the Saudi fund again. “It will be a real moral challenge for anyone to accept money moving forward from Saudi Arabia,” Menlo Ventures partner Venky Ganesan told The Washington Post in 2018.

That same year, Sam Altman, the entrepreneur and investor who is now CEO of OpenAI, stepped down from an advisory board for Neom, a futuristic city the Saudi government is building in the northwestern part of the country. Marc Andreessen, one of Andreessen Horowitz’s co-founders, was also on the Neom advisory board at the time, though it couldn’t be determined whether he is still on it. Following the Khashoggi murder in 2018, representatives of Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock and other venture firms declined to publicly discuss their limited partners.

For this story, a spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz, along with 35 other investment firms listed on Sanabil’s website, either didn’t respond to requests for comment or declined to comment. Other venture firms Sanabil lists include Dragoneer Investment Group, Greenoaks Capital Partners, TCV, Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group, startup accelerators 500 Startups and Techstars, crypto fund Polychain Capital, Iconiq Capital and Race Capital, among others.

One venture firm that did respond was San Francisco–based Village Global. “We think highly of the team there,” Village co-founder Ben Casnocha said in an email, referring to Sanabil. “We don’t otherwise share information about any of our LPs as we’re obligated by various confidentiality provisions in our agreements with them.” (Village also lists nearly two dozen individual LPs on its website, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.)

Sanabil didn’t respond to a request for comment. A public relations firm, Teneo, that represents PIF and Neom also didn’t respond to requests for comment.

But tech’s effort to distance itself from Saudi Arabia has changed in recent years, in part due to a successful public relations campaign run out of New York to distance the sovereign wealth fund, led by Yasir Al-Rumayyan, from the politics of Riyadh. At the same time, U.S. investors are struggling with a more challenging fundraising environment and are hopeful the deep-pocketed funds in the Middle East will help them meet their ambitious fund targets.

Sovereign wealth funds from the region control more than $3 trillion, according to sovereign wealth fund tracker Global SWF. According to Sanabil’s website, it invests $2 billion a year in VC, growth and buyout funds.

Last week, several Silicon Valley investors attended the Future Investment Initiative Institute conference in Miami, an event for global leaders that lists the Saudi PIF as a founding partner. Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the other co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, spoke onstage with former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann to discuss his new real estate company, Flow. The startup raised $350 million from Andreessen Horowitz in August 2022.

One of the venture funds Sanabil invested in is Valor Equity Partners. Valor’s founder, Antonio Gracias, is a board director at Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX and a former board director at Musk’s electric vehicle company, Tesla. Gracias spoke onstage Friday with Sanabil Chief Investment Officer Hani Enaya, according to the program and a photo from the event. Other speakers included Jared Kushner, Shervin Pishevar, Thiel Capital’s Jack Selby and the mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez.

And in October, Horowitz traveled to Riyadh for an earlier Future Investment Initiative Institute conference, where he spoke with Princess Reema bint Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Scott Shleifer, co-founder of Tiger Global Management’s private equity unit, also appeared at the event.