Sequoia Capital
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Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm founded in 1972 by Don Valentine and headquartered in Menlo Park, California.[1] It is one of the most successful venture firms in history, having backed Apple, Atari, Oracle, Cisco, Electronic Arts, Google, YouTube, Nvidia, Airbnb, WhatsApp, Stripe, and Instagram across five decades.[1] In June 2023 the firm announced that it would break its global partnership into three legally independent firms, a separation completed by March 2024: Sequoia Capital in the United States and Europe, HongShan in China, and Peak XV Partners in India and Southeast Asia.[2] The US and Europe firm reported roughly $56 billion in assets under management as of January 2025 and has become one of the most active investors in the generative AI wave, with positions in OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, and a long list of application-layer companies.[20][8] In April 2026 it raised roughly $7 billion for a new expansion fund, its largest late-stage vehicle ever, to deepen those AI bets, and it has deliberately put far more capital into companies that build on AI models than into the model labs themselves.[8][20] Since November 2025 it has been led by co-stewards Alfred Lin and Pat Grady.[4]
Don Valentine started Sequoia in 1972, before the phrase "Silicon Valley" was in common use and while institutional venture capital was still a young business.[6] His first fund made seminal bets on Atari, the video game company founded by Nolan Bushnell, and on Apple Computer, founded by former Atari employee Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak.[6] Valentine sat on both boards. Over the following decades the firm financed Oracle, Cisco, Electronic Arts, Google, YouTube, and Nvidia, a record that earned Valentine a reputation as a founder of the modern venture industry.[6] He stepped back from day-to-day investing well before his death on October 25, 2019, at age 87.[6]
Michael Moritz and Doug Leone took over leadership from Valentine in 1996 and ran the firm for more than two decades, for much of that time as co-stewards.[1] Leone became global managing partner as Moritz reduced his role in the early 2010s. Roelof Botha succeeded Jim Goetz as head of the US business in 2017 and, in July 2022, replaced Doug Leone as senior steward of the global brand and operations.[1] Michael Moritz left the partnership in July 2023 after 38 years to focus on Sequoia Heritage, the roughly $15 billion wealth-management vehicle he had co-founded with Leone in 2010.[5]
On November 4, 2025, Botha stepped aside as steward after about three years and handed leadership to Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, who became co-stewards.[4] The change returned Sequoia to the two-person leadership model it had used under Moritz and Leone. Lin, a former Zappos executive who joined Sequoia in 2010, is known for early backing of Airbnb, DoorDash, and Kalshi; Grady, who joined in 2007 and has led the firm's growth-stage investing since 2015, made his name on Snowflake, Zoom, Okta, and ServiceNow.[4] Botha moved into an advisory role while keeping board seats at companies he had backed.[4] The new stewards signaled they would deepen Sequoia's focus on artificial intelligence while working to present the firm as less politically partisan.[4]
For most of its modern history Sequoia operated as a loosely federated global partnership, with a US and Europe arm plus separately raised funds for China (Sequoia Capital China, launched in 2005 with Neil Shen) and for India and Southeast Asia (Sequoia Capital India, launched in 2006).[2] On June 6, 2023, the firm announced that these regional businesses would become three fully independent firms with no shared investors, profits, branding, or back-office operations.[2] The separation took effect by March 31, 2024.[2]
The three successor firms were:
| Firm | Region | Leadership | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sequoia Capital | United States and Europe | Roelof Botha (then steward) | Retained the original name and the Menlo Park base |
| HongShan | China | Neil Shen (Shen Nanpeng) | "HongShan" is the Mandarin word for sequoia; one of China's largest venture and growth investors |
| Peak XV Partners | India and Southeast Asia | Shailendra Singh, GV Ravishankar, Mohit Bhatnagar, Rajan Anandan | "Peak XV" references the original survey name for Mount Everest |
Sequoia's partners said running a decentralized global investment business had grown increasingly complex.[2] They cited portfolio conflicts, where the regional arms risked backing competing startups (the firm pointed to cases such as Stripe and Airwallex), brand confusion, and the compliance burden of operating a US firm with a large China practice amid rising US-China tensions.[2] After the split the firms compete in some overlapping markets, such as Singapore.[3]
The US and Europe firm reported approximately $56 billion in assets under management as of January 2025.[8][1] Its capital is organized differently from a traditional venture firm because of a 2021 restructuring (described below) that folded its public and private holdings into a single open-ended vehicle.[7]
In April 2026 Sequoia raised roughly $7 billion for a new "expansion" fund, its late-stage investing arm focused on the United States and Europe, and its largest fund of that kind to date.[8] The fund was nearly double the firm's last comparable vehicle, a $3.4 billion fund raised in 2022, and it was the first major capital raise under co-stewards Lin and Grady.[8] TechCrunch reported that the money was aimed squarely at AI, both the companies building foundation models and the startups applying them, and named OpenAI, Anthropic, the robotics company Physical Intelligence, and the AI-engineering agent company Factory among the portfolio it was meant to support.[8]
In October 2021 Sequoia broke with the standard venture model of fixed 10-year funds and reorganized around a single, permanent vehicle called The Sequoia Capital Fund.[7] Rather than committing capital to a series of funds that each wind down after a decade, limited partners hold a permanent allocation in the open-ended fund, which in turn feeds capital into closed-end sub-funds that make venture investments from seed to growth stage.[7] When portfolio companies go public, the fund can keep holding the shares instead of distributing them on a deadline, removing what the firm called the "artificial expiration dates" on its best companies.[7] Sequoia registered as an investment adviser to operate the structure, which lets it hold public stock and other assets that a conventional venture fund cannot.[7]
The open-ended fund grew to about $13.6 billion in liquid holdings by early 2023, a figure disclosed in a regulatory filing that represented public stock rolled in from legacy funds in companies such as Airbnb, DoorDash, Unity, and Snowflake, and to roughly $20 billion by early 2025.[21][7] Sequoia framed the change as a way to be a permanent partner to enduring companies; critics noted it also gave the firm more flexibility to hold winners and smooth returns across cycles.[7]
Sequoia has been among the most visible venture backers of the current AI cycle, and several of its partners have shaped how the industry talks about it.[20] Partner David Cahn's essays on AI infrastructure spending (widely cited as the "$200 billion" and "$600 billion" questions) argued that revenue would have to catch up with the capital pouring into data centers and chips. Sonya Huang co-authored Sequoia's influential market maps of generative AI and leads many of its application-layer bets, while Konstantine Buhler focuses on what the firm calls the "agent economy."[20] The firm hosts an annual AI Ascent event for founders; the third edition, held in San Francisco on May 2, 2025, gathered more than 100 founders and researchers, where Grady urged builders to "go at maximum velocity, all of the time" and Huang said coding had reached "screaming product-market fit."[22]
By the firm's own framing, it has put a relatively small amount, on the order of $150 million, directly into foundation-model companies such as OpenAI, xAI, and Safe Superintelligence, and "an order of magnitude more dollars," over $1.5 billion, into application-layer startups that build on those models, including Harvey, Glean, LangChain, Mercury, and Gong.[20] Sequoia has said it believes most of the billion-dollar companies created in AI will come from building applications rather than models, although it invests in both.[20] The portfolio spans both large language model developers and the AI agents and vertical tools built on top of them.
Sequoia first invested in OpenAI in 2021, with Alfred Lin and Pat Grady leading the firm's involvement; OpenAI later restructured and its valuation climbed from $300 billion in March 2025 to $500 billion in an October 2025 secondary share sale that made it the world's most valuable private company, and on to a post-money $852 billion in a funding round announced in March 2026.[20][23] The firm joined Elon Musk's xAI in its 2024 financings alongside Andreessen Horowitz and others, and backed Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence.[10] In January 2026 the Financial Times reported that Sequoia would take its first stake in Anthropic as part of a roughly $25 billion round at a $350 billion valuation, led by GIC and Coatue (each contributing about $1.5 billion) and including up to $15 billion combined from Microsoft and Nvidia; the $350 billion valuation was more than double the $170 billion Anthropic had reached roughly four months earlier.[18] Backing OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic at once was an unusual break from the venture convention of avoiding direct competitors, a flexibility Sequoia's fund structure and scale made easier.[18] One person familiar with the firm's thinking told the FT that the deal was "a round where the company is so big that it's gone from a VC investment to a stock investment."[18]
The table below lists notable AI investments. Round sizes and valuations are drawn from company and press announcements; Sequoia's role (lead, co-lead, or participant) is noted where reported.
| Company | Round / Year | Sequoia's role |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | First invested 2021; participated in later rounds | Investor (Lin and Grady) |
| Anthropic | ~$25B round, 2026, at a reported $350B valuation | Investor (first stake; reported by FT, January 2026) |
| xAI | Series B, May 2024 ($6B, $24B valuation); Series C, December 2024 ($6B, $50B valuation) | Participant |
| Safe Superintelligence | $1B, September 2024; $2B, 2025 ($32B valuation) | Participant |
| Harvey | Series D, February 2025 ($300M, $3B valuation); growth round, March 2026 ($200M, $11B valuation) | Lead (Series D); co-lead with GIC (2026) |
| Glean | Series C, 2022 ($100M, $1B valuation); Series F, June 2025 ($150M, $7.2B valuation) | Lead (Series C); participant (Series F) |
| Sierra | First round, February 2024 ($110M); Series E, May 2026 ($950M, $15.8B valuation) | Co-lead with Benchmark (2024); participant (2026) |
| LangChain | Series A, February 2024 ($25M, $200M valuation) | Lead |
| Physical Intelligence | Robotics foundation models | Investor (named by TechCrunch, 2026) |
Harvey, the legal AI startup, illustrates Sequoia's pattern of returning to winners: the firm led its February 2025 Series D at a $3 billion valuation and co-led a March 2026 growth round of $200 million that put the company at an $11 billion valuation, its fourth markup in roughly a year (from $3 billion to $5 billion in June 2025, $8 billion in December 2025, and $11 billion in March 2026).[12][13][24] Harvey said co-leading three of its rounds was "rare for Sequoia and reflects conviction that has only grown stronger since they first partnered at the Series A."[24] In enterprise search and AI agents, Sequoia led Glean's Series C at a $1 billion valuation and stayed in through later rounds that lifted it to $7.2 billion by mid-2025.[14] It co-led the first institutional round in Bret Taylor's customer-service agent company Sierra in early 2024 and remained an investor as Sierra's $950 million Series E reached a $15.8 billion valuation in May 2026.[15][16] Beyond the table, the firm has backed AI agent and infrastructure startups including Factory.
| Partner | Role | Notable investments / focus |
|---|---|---|
| Alfred Lin | Co-steward (since 2025) | Airbnb, DoorDash, OpenAI |
| Pat Grady | Co-steward (since 2025) | Snowflake, Zoom, Okta, OpenAI |
| Roelof Botha | Former steward (2022-2025); advisory partner | YouTube, Square/Block, MongoDB, Instagram, 23andMe |
| Doug Leone | Partner emeritus, former global managing partner | ServiceNow, Nubank |
| Sonya Huang | Partner, application-layer AI | Generative AI market maps; vertical AI apps |
| Konstantine Buhler | Partner, AI and enterprise | "Agent economy" thesis |
| David Cahn | Partner, AI infrastructure | AI capex analysis ("$600B question") |
| Stephanie Zhan | Partner, seed and early stage | Early-stage AI and software |
| Andrew Reed | Partner, growth | OpenAI and growth-stage AI |
In November 2022 Sequoia wrote its entire investment in the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, run by Sam Bankman-Fried, down to zero after FTX collapsed into bankruptcy.[9] The firm had invested about $150 million through its Global Growth Fund III and roughly $63.5 million through a separate fund, for a total of about $214 million.[9] Sequoia told its limited partners that the loss was contained: FTX was not a top-10 position and represented less than 3 percent of the relevant fund, whose gains over the same period far exceeded the loss.[9] Sequoia had published a long, admiring profile of Bankman-Fried on its website in September 2022 that it quietly removed after the collapse.[9]
In July 2025 Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire drew widespread criticism for posts on X about Zohran Mamdani, then a candidate in the New York City mayoral race, in which Maguire wrote that Mamdani "comes from a culture that lies about everything" and that lying was "a virtue" if it advanced an "Islamist agenda."[19] An open letter signed by more than a thousand founders and executives (organizers said 1,179 signatories representing 1,094 companies) urged Sequoia to denounce the remarks and clarify its stance on hate speech; a counter letter defending Maguire on free-speech grounds circulated on July 8, 2025.[19] According to the Financial Times, Sequoia declined to take action against Maguire, citing his right to free expression.[19] Sumaiya Balbale, the firm's chief operating officer and a practicing Muslim, resigned in August 2025 after five years, a departure reported to be connected to the firm's handling of the episode.[19]