Conviction
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Last reviewed
Jun 7, 2026
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14 citations
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Source-backed
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v1 · 1,558 words
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Conviction is an early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2022 by Sarah Guo, a former general partner at Greylock. The firm invests at the seed and early stages in companies it describes as "AI-native" or "Software 3.0," and it has become one of the defining specialist seed funds of the current artificial intelligence cycle. Within its first three years Conviction backed a string of widely watched AI startups, including legal-research company Harvey, coding-agent maker Cognition, enterprise conversational-AI firm Sierra, and French open-weights model lab Mistral AI. The firm is based in San Francisco and is also known for the "Embed" incubator program and the "No Priors" podcast that Guo co-hosts with investor Elad Gil.
Sarah Guo left Greylock in July 2022 after roughly nine years there, where she had joined in 2013 and become one of the youngest general partners in the firm's history while still in her twenties. In October 2022, around the time OpenAI launched ChatGPT, she announced Conviction with an inaugural fund of about $101 million. Guo had spent years at Greylock backing infrastructure, security, and data companies, and she framed the new firm as a focused bet that advances in large models were about to reshape software across many industries.
Guo grew up in Wisconsin, the daughter of two engineers who had worked at Bell Labs, and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania before working at Goldman Sachs and then entering venture capital. She is a regular commentator on AI in business media and appears on technology and investing lists, including the Midas List.
From the start Guo used the name with the intent to expand the partnership over time. In interviews she noted that the firm was set up so that she could eventually add other general partners rather than operating as a solo capitalist indefinitely, a plan that played out when Mike Vernal joined in early 2025.
Conviction describes itself as "purpose-built to serve AI-Native, 'Software 3.0' companies." The firm's stated view is that the industry is still "extremely early in the translation of powerful AI models to powerful products that transform industries," and that the biggest opportunities lie with technical teams who build quickly and pragmatically on top of frontier models. Rather than treating AI as a feature added to existing software, Conviction looks for companies whose products only become possible because of modern model capabilities.
The firm typically writes early checks and is often the first institutional investor in a company. Its public materials describe a range of roughly $1 million to $25 million, with reporting frequently citing typical first checks in the $1 million to $10 million band. Guo has summarized the discipline as resisting the temptation to invest in anything merely because it uses AI. In one widely cited formulation she said the point is not to swing an "AI hammer" at every problem, but to find the genuinely valuable "nails" worth building businesses around now that the hammer has become very good. This stance puts Conviction among a small group of seed funds, alongside generalist giants like Andreessen Horowitz, that have organized their entire strategy around the current wave of generative AI and AI agents.
Conviction has raised two flagship funds since its founding:
The Fund II close was paired with the addition of Mike Vernal as a general partner, formalizing the multi-partner structure implied by the firm's name. Conviction has presented Fund II as continuing the same early-stage, AI-native mandate rather than moving downstream into large growth rounds.
Conviction's portfolio is concentrated in applied AI, developer infrastructure, and agent companies. Several of its investments became some of the most closely tracked startups of the 2023 to 2026 period. The firm has stated it has backed 50 or more companies, and Guo and her partners are typically early backers rather than late-stage growth investors. The table below lists notable AI investments where Conviction's involvement is publicly documented; exact round leadership varies by company, so roles are described conservatively.
| Company | Round / Year | Conviction's role |
|---|---|---|
| Harvey | Early rounds, 2023 onward | Early backer of the legal-AI company, later valued in the billions |
| Mistral AI | 2023 onward | Investor in the French open-weights model lab |
| Sierra | 2023 onward | Early backer of Bret Taylor's enterprise conversational-AI firm |
| Cognition | 2023 onward | Early investor in the maker of the Devin coding agent |
| Baseten | Early rounds | Early backer of the model-inference platform |
| Cartesia | Early rounds | Early investor in the real-time voice and audio model startup |
| HeyGen | Early rounds | Investor in the AI video-avatar company |
| OpenEvidence | Early rounds | Early backer of the medical-AI search company |
Public figures reported for several of these companies illustrate how quickly the portfolio appreciated: Harvey has been reported at roughly a $3 billion valuation, Sierra at about $4.5 billion, Mistral at around $6 billion, and Baseten at roughly $825 million. These valuations reflect later rounds and are not Conviction's entry prices. Because round-by-round lead status is not consistently disclosed, the firm is described here as an early backer rather than as the lead on any specific financing unless the company itself confirmed that role.
Beyond direct investments, Conviction runs Embed, a selective program for very early founding teams building AI-native companies. Embed is structured as a roughly eight-week program for a small cohort, typically in the range of 10 to 12 teams, and pairs hands-on company-building support with a community of peers working on similar problems. Participating teams receive a small standardized investment, reported at around $150,000 through a most-favored-nation SAFE, along with substantial cloud and compute credits. Conviction has partnered with Microsoft to support the program, and the credit package has been described as including Azure and AWS cloud credits plus model and tooling credits from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The program also helps prospective founders find co-founders, and it accepts solo applicants who are still forming a team.
Guo is also the co-host, with investor Elad Gil, of No Priors, a podcast about AI, technology, and startups that interviews researchers, founders, and builders across the field. The show launched in the 2022 to early 2023 window, with its first episode featuring AI researcher Noam Brown, and it has become one of the more prominent interview podcasts in the AI ecosystem. The podcast has helped raise the public profile of both Conviction and Guo within the developer and founder community.
The Conviction team grew from a solo founder into a multi-partner firm over its first few years.
Conviction has emphasized that it intends to remain a focused, partner-driven early-stage firm rather than expanding into a large multi-strategy platform. As of 2026 it is widely regarded, alongside a handful of peers, as one of the seed funds most identified with the current generation of AI companies.