# Conviction

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/conviction_partners
> Updated: 2026-06-28
> Categories: AI Companies, Venture Capital
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), a free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Quote with attribution.

**Conviction** is an early-stage [venture capital](/wiki/venture_capital) firm founded in 2022 by [Sarah Guo](/wiki/sarah_guo), a former general partner at [Greylock](/wiki/greylock_partners), that invests exclusively in companies building on modern [artificial intelligence](/wiki/generative_ai). The firm writes seed and early-stage checks of roughly $1 million to $25 million into businesses it describes as "AI-Native" or "Software 3.0," and by mid-2026 it had backed more than 50 companies, including legal-research startup [Harvey](/wiki/harvey_ai), coding-agent maker [Cognition](/wiki/cognition_ai), enterprise conversational-AI firm [Sierra](/wiki/sierra_ai), and French open-weights model lab [Mistral AI](/wiki/mistral_ai).[1][4][15] Conviction 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.[8][11]

## What is Conviction?

Conviction is a specialist seed and early-stage venture firm organized entirely around the current [AI](/wiki/generative_ai) cycle. On its own site the firm describes itself as "purpose-built to serve AI-Native, 'Software 3.0' companies," and it states a check-size range of $1 million to $25 million, with reporting frequently citing typical first checks in the $1 million to $10 million band.[1] The firm typically writes early checks and is often the first institutional investor in a company. As of June 2026, third-party trackers credited Conviction with investments in roughly 52 companies, including 24 new investments made in 2025 and 21 in the first half of 2026, and counted 8 unicorns and 3 acquisitions or exits across the portfolio.[15] Within its first three years the firm became one of the defining specialist seed funds of the generative-AI era.

## Who founded Conviction, and who is Sarah Guo?

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.[3][5] In October 2022, around the time [OpenAI](/wiki/openai) launched ChatGPT, she announced Conviction with an inaugural fund of about $101 million.[4] 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.[3] She is a regular commentator on AI in business media and appears on technology and investing lists, including the Midas List.[2][3]

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.[4]

## What is Conviction's AI-native investment thesis?

Conviction describes itself as "purpose-built to serve AI-Native, 'Software 3.0' companies."[1] The firm's stated view, in its own words, is that "we believe we are 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.[1] 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.

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.[5] This stance puts Conviction among a small group of seed funds, alongside generalist giants like [Andreessen Horowitz](/wiki/andreessen_horowitz), that have organized their entire strategy around the current wave of [generative AI](/wiki/generative_ai) and [AI agents](/wiki/ai_agents).

## How much does Conviction manage, and what funds has it raised?

Conviction has raised two flagship funds since its founding:

| Fund | Year | Size | Notes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Fund I | 2022 | ~$101 million | Announced October 2022 at the firm's launch[4] |
| Fund II | 2025 | $230 million | Closed and announced January 31, 2025, more than doubling the debut fund[4][13][14] |

Fund II's $230 million in capital commitments more than doubled the size of the $101 million debut fund.[4] Reporting in late 2024 had indicated Guo was targeting around $200 million before the fund closed above that figure.[7] 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.[4] Conviction has presented Fund II as continuing the same early-stage, AI-native mandate rather than moving downstream into large growth rounds.

## What companies are in Conviction's AI portfolio?

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 been reported to have backed more than 50 companies, and Guo and her partners are typically early backers rather than late-stage growth investors.[15] 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](/wiki/harvey_ai) | Early rounds, 2023 onward | Early backer of the legal-AI company, later valued in the billions |
| [Mistral AI](/wiki/mistral_ai) | 2023 onward | Investor in the French open-weights model lab |
| [Sierra](/wiki/sierra_ai) | 2023 onward | Early backer of Bret Taylor's enterprise conversational-AI firm |
| [Cognition](/wiki/cognition_ai) | 2023 onward | Early investor in the maker of the Devin coding agent |
| [Baseten](/wiki/baseten) | Early rounds | Early backer of the model-inference platform |
| [Cartesia](/wiki/cartesia) | Early rounds | Early investor in the real-time voice and audio model startup |
| [HeyGen](/wiki/heygen) | Early rounds | Investor in the AI video-avatar company |
| [OpenEvidence](/wiki/openevidence) | Early rounds | Early backer of the medical-AI search company |
| Thinking Machines Lab | 2025 | Investor in Mira Murati's AI research lab[1][15] |
| Sunday Robotics | 2025 | Provided the first seed term sheet, with Sarah Guo backing the home-robotics startup[16] |

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.[4][15] 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. One documented exception is Sunday Robotics, the Mountain View home-robot startup founded by Stanford roboticists Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, where Conviction provided the first term sheet for the seed round and Bloomberg described the company as "Guo-backed" when it emerged from stealth in November 2025; the company later raised a $165 million Series B at a $1.15 billion valuation in March 2026.[16]

## What is the Embed program, and what is the No Priors podcast?

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.[8] 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.[8] Microsoft is the exclusive cloud partner of Embed, and the credit package has been described as including roughly $350,000 in AWS credits, $350,000 in Azure credits, and more than $500,000 of additional compute, inference, and tooling credits from providers such as [OpenAI](/wiki/openai), [Anthropic](/wiki/anthropic), [Baseten](/wiki/baseten), Pinecone, Vercel, and Weights and Biases.[8][9] 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.[11] The show launched in the 2022 to early 2023 window, with its first episode featuring AI researcher Noam Brown of Meta's Fundamental AI Research team, and it has become one of the more prominent interview podcasts in the AI ecosystem.[12] The podcast has helped raise the public profile of both Conviction and Guo within the developer and founder community.

## Who are the people at Conviction?

The Conviction team grew from a solo founder into a multi-partner firm over its first few years.

- **Sarah Guo** is the founder and a general partner. She previously spent about nine years as a partner at Greylock and is the firm's public face, podcast co-host, and lead voice on its AI-native thesis.[3][4]
- **Mike Vernal** joined as a general partner in January 2025, alongside the Fund II close. He had been a partner at [Sequoia Capital](/wiki/sequoia_capital) for roughly seven years before leaving in 2023, and before that spent about eight years at Facebook as a vice president of product and engineering. His venture track record includes work with companies such as Notion, Rippling, and Verkada.[4]
- **Pranav Reddy** is a partner at the firm. Before Conviction he was an engineer at the search startup Neeva, where he worked on indexing, retrieval, and language modeling, and earlier he was a neuroscience researcher.[10]
- **Bella Garcia-Camargo** is part of the firm's investing and operating team and is listed among its founding members.[1]

Conviction has emphasized that it intends to remain a focused, partner-driven early-stage firm rather than expanding into a large multi-strategy platform.[4] 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.[15]

## ELI5: What does Conviction do?

Conviction is a group of investors who give money to brand-new companies that build things using artificial intelligence. They were started in 2022 by Sarah Guo, who used to invest at another famous firm. When a tiny AI startup is just getting going, Conviction hands it some money, advice, and connections in exchange for owning a small piece of the company, hoping that piece becomes very valuable if the startup succeeds. They also run a short "boot camp" called Embed for new founders and make a popular podcast called No Priors where they talk to people building AI.

## See also

- [Sarah Guo](/wiki/sarah_guo)
- [Andreessen Horowitz](/wiki/andreessen_horowitz)
- [Sequoia Capital](/wiki/sequoia_capital)
- [Greylock](/wiki/greylock_partners)
- [Venture capital](/wiki/venture_capital)
- [Harvey](/wiki/harvey_ai)
- [Mistral AI](/wiki/mistral_ai)
- [Cognition](/wiki/cognition_ai)

## References

1. Conviction, official site (team, thesis, portfolio, check size): https://www.conviction.com/
2. Sarah Guo, personal site: https://sarahguo.com/
3. Sarah Guo, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Guo
4. TechCrunch, "Guo's Conviction Partners adds Mike Vernal as GP, raises $230M fund" (January 31, 2025): https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/31/guos-conviction-partners-adds-mike-vernal-as-gp-raises-230m-fund/
5. Fortune, "Sarah Guo's path to becoming a top AI investor" (April 14, 2025): https://fortune.com/2025/04/14/conviction-ai-venture-sarah-guo-greylock-investor/
6. Fortune, "Conviction investor Sarah Guo leads venture capital in AI" (April 28, 2025): https://fortune.com/2025/04/28/sarah-guo-conviction-ai-investing/
7. The Information, "Sarah Guo's Conviction Nears $200M Fund II": https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/sarah-guos-conviction-nears-200m-fund-ii
8. Conviction Embed, program site: https://embed.conviction.com/
9. Microsoft for Startups, "Microsoft working with Conviction Partners to support AI incubator, Embed": https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/startups/blog/microsoft-working-with-conviction-partners-to-support-ai-incubator/
10. Pranav Reddy, personal site: https://pgreddy.com/
11. No Priors podcast (Apple Podcasts): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-priors-artificial-intelligence-technology-startups/id1668002688
12. Sarah Guo, "First episode of me & Elad Gil's new AI pod 'No Priors' w/ Noam Brown" (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sarahxguo_first-episode-of-me-elad-gils-new-ai-pod-activity-7027336704948637696-YnsP
13. Gunderson Dettmer, "Conviction Partners Secures $230M Second Fund": https://www.gunder.com/en/news-insights/client-news/conviction-partners-secures-230m-second-fund
14. Dakota, "Conviction Partners Closes Second Flagship Fund at $230M": https://www.dakota.com/fundraising-news/conviction-partners-closes-second-flagship-fund-at-230m
15. Tracxn, "Conviction, 2026 Investor Profile, Portfolio, Team and Investment Trends" (accessed June 2026): https://tracxn.com/d/venture-capital/conviction/
16. Bloomberg, "Guo-Backed Startup Sunday Unveils Robot for Chores" (November 25, 2025): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2025-11-25/guo-backed-startup-sunday-unveils-robot-for-chores-video