Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Founded in 1972 by Don Valentine, it is among the oldest and most influential venture firms in Silicon Valley.¹ As of January 2025, the firm managed approximately $56 billion in assets.¹ Its portfolio includes Apple, Google, Nvidia, YouTube, Airbnb, Stripe, and ByteDance.¹

Founding and early years

Don Valentine founded Sequoia in 1972 in Menlo Park, at a time when California's venture capital industry was still nascent.¹ He named the firm after the sequoia tree, which can live for thousands of years.² The first fund, raised in 1974, was $5 million.¹ With that capital, Valentine invested in Atari (1975) and Apple (1978), two of the earliest and most consequential bets in Silicon Valley history.¹²

Sequoia invested in Cisco in its first decade and added Google to its portfolio in 1999.¹ The firm also backed Nvidia in its early rounds.¹ These investments established Sequoia's reputation for identifying category-defining companies at their earliest stages.

Doug Leone and Michael Moritz assumed leadership of the firm in 1996.¹ Moritz stepped back from day-to-day operations in 2012, and Leone became global managing partner.¹ Jim Goetz led the U.S. business from 2012 until 2017, when Roelof Botha succeeded him.¹

The Sequoia Capital Fund and evergreen structure

In October 2021, Sequoia announced the Sequoia Capital Fund, an open-ended evergreen structure for its U.S. and European business.¹ Traditional venture funds operate on 10-year cycles, forcing partners to sell or distribute stock at fixed intervals. The evergreen structure eliminated that constraint: limited partners who wanted liquidity could withdraw capital instead of waiting for fund distributions.¹ The fund's net asset value reached $13.6 billion by early 2023.¹ Sequoia also converted to a registered investment adviser (RIA), giving the firm more flexibility in the types of investments it could make.¹

Global expansion and split

Sequoia established an Israel-focused fund in 1999.¹ In 2005, Sequoia Capital China was founded under Neil Shen, followed by Sequoia Capital India (later Surge and Peak XV Partners).¹ The Indian arm became the most active VC firm in India by 2019.¹

In June 2023, Sequoia announced it would split into three fully independent entities: Sequoia Capital (U.S. and Europe), HongShan (China, from the Mandarin word for "sequoia"), and Peak XV Partners (India and Southeast Asia).⁴⁵ The separation, completed by March 2024, cited geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China and confusion caused by the shared brand across entities.¹ The three entities would no longer share investors or profits.¹

In October 2023, the U.S. House Committee on U.S.–China Competition opened a probe into Sequoia's prior investments in Chinese technology companies.¹

In November 2025, Botha was succeeded by Alfred Lin and Pat Grady as joint managing partners, or "stewards," in line with the firm's succession model.⁶⁷

Notable investments

Sequoia's portfolio spans five decades of technology. Early bets included Apple (1978), Cisco, and Nvidia.¹ In the 2000s, the firm invested in Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe.¹ Key 2010s investments included Instacart, Snowflake, Unity Technologies, Klarna, Nubank, UiPath, and ByteDance.¹ In the 2020s, Sequoia invested in Wiz, Loom, and FTX.¹

The firm has backed more than 1,000 companies. In 2019, the Hurun Research Institute identified Sequoia as the world's top unicorn investor, noting it had invested in roughly one in five private companies valued at $1 billion or more.¹

FTX

Sequoia invested approximately $214 million in FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried.¹ The firm published a glowing profile of Bankman-Fried on its website on September 22, 2022.¹ When FTX collapsed in November 2022 with about $8 billion in missing customer funds, Sequoia wrote its investment down to zero.¹ The firm removed the Bankman-Fried profile from its website and notified limited partners that the FTX stake represented a small portion of the overall portfolio.¹

John Naughton has suggested that Sequoia's earlier decision to pass on investing in Facebook around 2005 contributed to a "fear of missing out" that may have contributed to the FTX investment.¹

Fund history

Sequoia's earliest fund was $5 million in 1974.¹ Fund sizes grew steadily through the 1980s and 1990s, reaching $350 million for Fund VIII (1998).¹ The firm launched its Global Growth fund series in 2012 with $700 million, followed by Growth II ($2 billion, 2015), Growth III ($8 billion, 2018), and Growth IV ($2.25 billion, 2022).¹

The Sequoia Capital Fund (the evergreen vehicle) held a net asset value of $13.6 billion as of early 2023.¹ In February 2022, Sequoia raised a $600 million Crypto Fund as a sub-fund of the evergreen structure.¹ In July 2023, the firm reduced the crypto fund from $585 million to $200 million and shifted focus to earlier-stage investments after the crypto market crash.¹

Sequoia's Fund XII ($450 million, 2006 vintage) returned over 30x gross, making it the highest-performing fund in the firm's 50-year history.[@linkedin-sequoia-whos-who]

Scout program

Sequoia launched its scout program in 2009, the first in the venture capital industry.¹ Scouts receive capital to invest in early-stage startups without going through the traditional partner deliberation process. The program has invested in over 1,000 companies and has been widely imitated across the industry.¹ Sequoia expanded scouts to Europe in 2019 and partnered with BLCK VC in 2021 to provide training for Black scouts.¹ In March 2022, Sequoia launched Arc, a structured program offering $1 million in funding per participant, with sessions in London and Silicon Valley.¹

China strategy

Sequoia was the largest investor in China's consumer internet sector as of 2024.¹ The firm often invested in multiple competitors within the same sector and then pushed for consolidation, a strategy documented in Chinese media regarding the mergers of Meituan and Dianping, Uber China and Didi, and VShop and Lefenghui.¹

Controversies

In July 2025, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire posted that Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim American New York City mayoral candidate, "came from a culture that lies about everything" and accused him of advancing an "Islamist agenda."¹ The remarks were widely denounced as Islamophobic.¹ Over 600 tech founders signed an open letter asking Sequoia to adopt a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech and religious bigotry.¹ In August 2025, Sequoia COO Sumaiya Balbale resigned after senior partners declined to take action against Maguire on free speech grounds.¹