Sequoia
Prominent venture capital firm and backer of Ent's seed round.
- Christina Cacioppo - Building an Enduring Software Company in the Age of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.496]
- Investors Turn on Data Center Builders as Rising Interest Rates Dampen the AI Trade
- Hyperscalers double-dip the chip
- New GPs go hungry
- Anthropic's IPO Can't Wait Forever
- 67 AI startups fighting rogue agents
- Agents Promise to Remake the Web. As Instinct & Muse Take Off, We’ll Begin to See How it Looks.
- Gabe Stengel - Building Investing Superintelligence - [Invest Like the Best, EP.492]
- The Senate Shoots Down the Crypto Industry's Big Bill
- Meet our VC all-star team
- 🔥World's Hottest Startups in September 2026
- Nvidia Buys Hugging Face for $13B
“a16z, Sequoia, Founders Fund, Coatue, General Catalyst, Peak XV, Lightspeed, Khosla Ventures, CRV and Kfund.”
“Nuclear-reactor maker that raised roughly $1B in funding; backed by Sequoia.”
Source→“They've raised $1.5B to date from Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, GV, Coatue, Elad Gil, the OpenAI Startup Fund, and GIC.”
“Nvidia is in talks to deepen its existing investment in or acquire open-weight AI model developer Reflection AI, which is also backed by investors including Sequoia and 1789 Capital.”
“raised over $35m from Lightspeed, Sequoia, Index, Accel, Stanford University, the Nintendo Family, the ZeniMax Family, Eric Schmidt, and the founders of Slack and FunPlus.”
“Reflection... backed by Sequoia, shipping a near-frontier model”
Source→“I'm an investor in fireworks as is Sequoia. And I think the biggest concern I would have as a fireworks or a base 10 or a modal investor would be that actually big enterprises are concerned about Chinese models.”
Source→“$50M Series B at $750M with Sequoia and EQT. Develops an agentic AI platform to streamline and automate complex hardware engineering programmes”
“Instinct raised a $1 billion Series C from Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue at a $10 billion valuation.”
Source→“Sequoia came in second with six votes, though some of those votes were grudging, given how obvious a pick it is.”
Source→“he boils everything down into like two bullet points”
Source→“David Tisch... introduced Stengel to Series A investors despite the eventual wave of rejections... Keith Rabois only invested a month later... We went to dinner with Avery and Vince, fell in love with them and the firm”
Source→“raised a $180 million round at a $1.8 billion valuation... co-led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.”
Source→“Profound — Marketing software for AI search optimization. Received a $180 million Series D led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins at a $1.8 billion valuation.”
Source→“Factory — AI coding agent developer. Secured a $200 million round at a $5 billion valuation from investors including Khosla Ventures, Blackstone and Sequoia.”
Source→“Mecka AI — Humanoid robotics training startup in talks to raise at a $500M valuation led by Sequoia”
“We will see deal structures that are objectively bad for the company done more and more often to win deals... We haven't even reached the peak of crazy deal structures.”
Source→“At least 95 investors – including Sequoia, Founders Fund, Coatue, and Altimeter – now hold stakes in both Anthropic and OpenAI, as the AI boom upends the old VC taboo against backing direct competitors.”
Source→“Constantine built a relationship with Ken since he was a student. He had been his mentor for years and years.”
Source→“The best investments in all the funds are always the companies where the sponsor had the highest conviction. That's just the one thing that's been true time and time again across funds.”
Source→“We need to think of a bits-perfect platform that's good at converting agents.”
Source→“He's an N-of-1 researcher going after a very different type of architecture.”
Source→“Credits to Sean when he brought in the SpaceX investment. We vote on companies. I think someone voted a one.”
Source→“It came from the realization that if AI is going to be so transformative, we are just on the foothill of this incredible exponential... the human brain is just not very good at dealing with exponentials.”
Source→“By rank 10 the score has dropped to roughly 3,000, less than a third of Sequoia's. By rank 100 it is 245. The top firm scores about 41 times the hundredth.”
Source→“Etched, a San Jose, Calif.-based builder of frontier inference clusters, raised $700m at a $21b valuation. Jane Street led, joined by Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, a16z, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Primary, Stripes, Positive Sum, and Blackstone.”
Source→“Accel, Index Ventures and Sequoia are the top three firms in The Syndicate, a global ranking of venture capitalists based on the measurable outcomes of their investments from PitchBook data on each firm's deal and exit history.”
Source→“A second fund closed at $230 million alongside the hire of Mike Vernal, previously a partner at Sequoia and before that one of Facebook's most senior product leaders.”
Source→“In the last 6 mo's I've seen a half dozen rounds where sequoia invests in 2 tranches. everyone pretends they only did the higher valuation...calling the tactic 'deceptive.'”
Source→“Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, in a reply, claimed the practice was rare.”
Source→“Brendan Foody, CEO of the AI-training startup Mercor, stirred the pot on the issue on X last month, writing: 'in the last 6 mo's ive seen a half dozen rounds where sequoia invests in 2 tranches. everyone pretends they only did the higher valuation,' and calling the tactic 'deceptive.'”
Source→“Form Energy's $750M Series G — backed by T. Rowe Price, Sequoia, Franklin Templeton, TPG Rise Climate, GE Vernova, and others”
“California-based defense tech startup Neros secured a $250 million round led by Sequoia and American Strategic Technology Fund at a $2.5 billion valuation.”
Source→“Lovable... raised $400M Series C at a $13.3B post-money valuation”
“The involvement of Sequoia (typically consumer/enterprise-focused) in defense signals a broadening of institutional VC appetite for the sector.”
Source→“LLMs first cracked the top 15 in 2016 and didn't hit #1 until 2022; AI coding entered at #12 in 2021 and topped the list by 2026; crypto entered in 2011, well before its 2017 and 2021 peaks... The Top Company of a Given Year Is Rarely the Hyped Topic of That Year: Airbnb (2008) launched while Google dominated the conversation, Uber (2009) arrived amid low-level programming chatter, and Anthropic (2021) was founded while crypto consumed the internet.”
Source→“Neros Hits $2.5B Valuation on $250M Series C”
AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.