The firm operates three regionally-focused venture entities, as Sequoia in Europe, Peak XV Partners in Southeast Asia, andHongShan in China.[6] Sequoia has made a wide variety of venture investments since inception, including inApple,ByteDance, andCisco, among many others.[7][8]
The firm was named after theSequoia tree, indigenous to California.
Sequoia was founded byDon Valentine in 1972 in Menlo Park, California,[9][10][11] at a time when the state's venture capital industry was just beginning to develop.[12][13] Sequoia formed its first venture capital fund in 1974,[12][14] and was an early investor inAtari the next year.[15][16][17] In 1978, Sequoia became one of the first investors inApple.[16][18][19] PartnersDoug Leone andMichael Moritz assumed leadership of the firm in 1996.[15][20]
In 1999, Sequoia established a dedicated investment fund for Israeli startups.[21][12] In 2005, Sequoia Capital China was established,[22] later followed by Sequoia Capital India.[23] In 2012, Moritz took a step back from the day-to-day operations of the firm.[24] Leone became Global Managing Partner.[25][26]Jim Goetz led Sequoia's U.S. business from 2012 until 2017, when he was succeeded byRoelof Botha.[27] In 2016, Sequoia hiredJess Lee, making her the first female investing partner in the United States in the firm's history.[28][29] In 2019, it was the most activeVC fund company in India.[30]
In March 2020, Sequoia announced it would hire Luciana Lixandru as its first partner based in Europe.[31][32] In October 2021, Sequoia announced it would implement a new fund structure for its U.S. and European business that would allow it to remain involved with companies after their public market debuts.[33][34][35] In March 2022,The Information reported that Sequoia Capital China was raising an $8 billion fund to invest in Chinese tech companies.[36] Following thecollapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023, theFederal Deposit Insurance Corporation had backstopped Sequoia's $1billion in deposits in the bank.[37]
In June 2023, Sequoia announced plans to break up into three entities citing complications running a decentralized global investment business in the middle of geopolitical tensions.[38] Following the separation, expected to complete by March 2024, the Chinese business led byNeil Shen would be calledHongShan ("sequoia" in Mandarin) and the Indian and Southeast Asia arm would be named Peak XV Partners. The U.S. and Europe unit would retain the Sequoia name.[39] In July 2023, Sequoia announced to cut one-third of its talent staff as part of an organizational restructuring.[40] In October 2023, theU.S. House Committee on U.S.–China Competition announced a probe into Sequoia Capital's investments in China.[41]
As of at least 2024, Sequoia is the largest investor inChina's consumer internet sector.[42]: 94 It has often used a strategy of investing in several competitors in the same sector and then later pushing for their consolidation.[42]: 94–95 According toChinese media, Sequoia was one of the major influences in mergers betweenMeituan andDianping, betweenUber China andDidi, and between VShop and Lefenghui.[42]: 95
In July 2025, Sequoia partnerShaun Maguire stated thatZohran Mamdani, aMuslim AmericanNew York Citymayoral candidate, "came from a culture that lies about everything" and seeks to advance "hisIslamist agenda".[43][44] That statement was widely denounced as bigoted and Islamophobic.[45][46] In response, 600 founders of tech startups signed an open letter to Sequoia, asking Sequoia to adopt "azero-tolerance policy onhate speech andreligious bigotry."[43] In August 2025, Sequoia's COO, Sumaiya Balbale, who is open about the influence of her Muslim faith on her career, resigned after five years with the company over Maguire's posts after other senior partners decline to take action against Maguire on the basis of free speech.[47]
In November 2025, Botha was succeeded byAlfred Lin and Pat Grady as joint managing partners of the firm.[48]
Investors, referred to as limited partners, contribute money to a fund that the firm's general partners then invest in business ventures.[49][50] Its limited partners have primarily been university endowments, charitable foundations, and other large institutions.[51][52][53] Sequoia specializes in seed stage,[54] early stage,[54] and growth stage[55] investments in private technology companies,[56] including those in the clean tech, consumer internet, crypto, financial services, healthcare, mobile, and robotics sectors.[57][58][59] The firm has been often recognized for its strong track record of early investments.[60][61] The firm has also distinguished itself from other top venture capital firms by diversifying its investments and not just focusing on U.S. early-stage venture capital.[55][12][62] Sequoia is an umbrella brand for three different venture entities: one focused on the U.S. and Europe, another on India and Southeast Asia, and a third on China.[63] Following the June 2023 announcement to make the three entities independent, from 2024 the ventures would no longer share investors or profits.[64][38]
A notable opportunity missed by Sequoia was the failure to invest inFacebook in its early days c. 2005;John Naughton suggested that this failure led to "fear of missing out" and may have contributed to Sequoia's investing heavily in FTX in 2022, prior to its collapse in 2023.[65] In 2019,Hurun Research Institute identified Sequoia as the world's topunicorn investor, noting it had invested in one in five of all private companies valued at $1 billion or more.[66][67] In July 2021, Sequoia published a piece about "the Latin American startup opportunity" that signaled it would increase its focus there.[68][69]
In October 2021, Sequoia announced the Sequoia Capital Fund, a new fund structure for its U.S. and European business.[70] The fund structure is unique for VC funds as they are typically funds with a 10-year fund cycle instead of an open-ended evergreen fund.[71] The Sequoia fund will no longer need to sell or distribute stock as in the usual VC fund cycle. Instead, limited partners who want liquidity can pull money out of the fund.[72] Sequoia also announced it would become aRIA which would allow the firm more flexibility in its investments.[71] In February 2022, Sequoia raised a $600 million Sequoia Crypto Fund. As one of the first sub-funds of Sequoia Capital Fund, the crypto fund will mainly invest in cryptocurrencies traded on third-party exchanges.[73]
In June 2022, Sequoia announced that it had raised $2.85 billion in additional funds to invest in India and Southeast Asia.[74] The amount of funds raised is also the largest to date for the company in both India and Southeast Asia.[75] In early 2023, the size of Sequoia Capital Fund reached $13.6 billion.[76]
In June 2023, the firm led a Seed round funding of $5.7 million for Defense startup, Mach Industries.[77] Sequoia Capital along with other notable venture capital investors made an investment in thecryptocurrency exchangeFTX, founded bySam Bankman-Fried.[78][79][80][81] Sequoia was very enthusiastic about FTX, and published an article which was a glowing tribute to Bankman-Fried[82] on its website on 22 September 2022.[65][83] FTX failed in 2023, with about $8 billion of investors' money missing, and Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud. The value of Sequoia's investment in FTX was ultimately written down to $0; it is estimated that they lost $214 million on their investment.[84] The company released a notice to investors, stating that their stake in FTX represented a small amount of their investment portfolio.[85] They also removed the profile of Bankman-Fried from their website.[86][87][88]
In July 2023, it reduced the size of its cryptocurrency fund from $585 million to $200 million, and shifted focus to young start-ups after an industry crash.[89] In 2023, Sequoia launched its Open Source Fellowship to fund up to three open source developers annually via an equity-free fellowship.[90]
In March 2025, Bloomberg announced, Sequoia's leading $190 million investment round for a law enforcement technology startup Peregrine.[91] That same month, Kela, an Israeli defense-tech startup founded by former intelligence officers during theGaza invasion that was co-funded by Sequoia, was launched.[92] In May 2025, Sequoia invested £100 million inMubi, valuing the company at $1 billion.[93] The investment sparked controversy due to Sequoia's previous funding of Kela.[92]
In 2009, Sequoia launched its scout program, which functions as an individual investor network that provides founders and other individuals with capital to invest in promising early-stage startups.[115][116] Sequoia Scouts have invested in over 1,000 companies.[117] Sequoia was the first venture capital firm to offer a scout program, and the model has since been emulated by others in the industry.[115][116]
In 2021, Sequoia partnered on the BLCK VC Scout Network to provide training and education to current and aspiring Black scouts.[117] In March 2022, Sequoia launched Arc, a structured program in which participants receive $1 million in funding to work with Sequoia partners in both London and Silicon Valley.[118]
^Clark, Kate (February 5, 2025)."Sequoia Capital's Evergreen Fund Grows to Almost $20 Billion".Bloomberg. RetrievedJuly 30, 2025.Sequoia continues to manage sub-funds that feed into the larger core fund. The firm's assets under management have reached a total of $56 billion, according to a separate regulatory filing from January, placing it among the largest venture capital firms.
^Garland, Russ (December 10, 2012)."Sequoia's Leone: In Venture, Big is the Enemy of Great".The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, Inc.Archived from the original on June 25, 2021. RetrievedAugust 3, 2021.Leone, who has been managing Sequoia since Michael Moritz stepped back because of illness in May, skewered VCs who act like private-equity managers with corner offices and pride in their assets under management and investment "platforms."
^Anders, George; Konrad, Alex (April 23, 2014)."Sequoia Capital: Creating Disruptions, and Billionaires".Forbes India.Archived from the original on December 6, 2021. RetrievedAugust 3, 2021.Even in his perch as a managing partner at venture firm Sequoia Capital, Leone still carries himself like a hard-luck striver, scrambling for his first decent break.
^Matney, Lucas (October 26, 2021)."Sequoia dramatically revamps its fund structure as it looks to rethink venture capital model".TechCrunch.Archived from the original on November 2, 2021. RetrievedNovember 8, 2021.Gone are the 10-year return cycles, which often pushed investors to liquidate holdings in public companies based on set timelines rather than determinations of when investments had fully matured. Sequoia says that investments will no longer have 'expiration dates;' instead, Sequoia will recycle returns from startup bets back into its central fund which it will redeploy into future investments — what the firm calls a 'continuous feedback loop.'
^Schubarth, Cromwell (October 29, 2021)."Sequoia Capital just flipped the script on VC funds. Here's why and why it matters".Silicon Valley Business Journal. American City Business Journals.Archived from the original on October 29, 2021. RetrievedNovember 8, 2021.By getting away with from the standard 10-year structure, Sequoia will have more leeway to not only invest before those kinds of funds but also to stay in the game long after they arrive.
^Thompson, Ben (October 27, 2021)."Sequoia Productive Capital".Stratechery.Archived from the original on November 1, 2021. RetrievedNovember 9, 2021.Instead of LP's investing in funds that make speculative investments in risky endeavors, Sequoia wants to keep long-term positions in companies that have proven business models and are embarking on the decade (or longer) process of improving their products and expanding their markets to the entire world.
^Cutler, Kim-Mai (April 1, 2018)."The Unicorn Hunters".Logic.Archived from the original on September 17, 2021. RetrievedAugust 6, 2021.Venture capitalists don't just provide capital, in other words. They also have to raise it. A firm's managers—called "general partners"—are responsible for finding limited partners to finance investments. They also often have to invest a meaningful amount of their personal wealth in the fund they work for, so that limited partners are assured they have skin in the game. Historically, limited partners have included major pension funds, endowments, and other large institutions.
^Anders, George; Konrad, Alex (April 23, 2014)."Sequoia Capital: Creating Disruptions, and Billionaires".Forbes India.Archived from the original on December 6, 2021. RetrievedAugust 3, 2021.Consider Sequoia Venture XI Fund, which in 2003 raised $387 million from about 40 limited partners, chiefly universities and foundations
^Efrati, Amir; Konrad, Zoë (November 6, 2019)."The Information's Seed Investors to Watch".The Information.Archived from the original on September 26, 2021. RetrievedAugust 3, 2021.Sequoia has seed, venture and growth funds in the U.S., as well as a global growth fund, but doesn't provide details on its funds. Sequoia most recently raised an $8 billion Global Growth Fund. Limited partners in the funds: Ford Foundation, Mayo Clinic, MIT, Stanford University, The Wellcome Trust, Harvard, Cleveland Clinic
^abcdefgWinkler, Rolfe (October 27, 2019)."Venture Capital Pioneer Kept Entrepreneurs' Egos in Check".The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, Inc.Archived from the original on April 11, 2021. RetrievedAugust 9, 2021.His hobby became Sequoia Capital, which over the following five decades has built an unrivaled record of venture capital investing, betting early on Atari and Apple Inc. in the 1970s, Cisco Systems Inc. and Oracle Corp. in the 1980s, Yahoo! and Google in the 1990s, Airbnb Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. in the 2000s, and Stripe Inc., Square Inc. and WhatsApp this decade.
^Alden, William; Gelles, David (February 20, 2014)."In WhatsApp Deal, Sequoia Capital May Make 50 Times Its Money".The New York Times.Archived from the original on July 25, 2021. RetrievedAugust 9, 2021.While Sequoia is not as flashy as some of Silicon Valley's newer tech investors, it has built a remarkable track record over the years, as an early investor in technology giants like Apple, Google, Yahoo and Oracle.
^Wang, Eudora (August 28, 2020)."Sequoia Capital China files for three new funds with SEC".DealStreetAsia. DealStreetAsia Pte Ltd. RetrievedAugust 3, 2021.According to Huron Global Unicorn Index 2020 released in August, Sequoia Capital has by far captured a total of 109 unicorns, which are private companies valued at $1 billion and more.
^Fisher, Adam (22 September 2022)."Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex—And Maybe You Should Too". Sequoia. Archived fromthe original on 27 October 2022. Archived Web page has original praise; live page reads: "On November 9th [2023] we sent a letter to our LPs with our updated outlook on FTX, and we removed our profile story on SBF the next morning."
^Shubarth, Cromwell (February 1, 2017)."No. 1 Midas investor Jim Goetz steps aside at Sequoia".Silicon Valley Business Journal. American City Business Journals.Archived from the original on June 17, 2017. RetrievedFebruary 17, 2022.Sequoia had about a 22 percent stake in Palo Alto Networks when it went public with a market cap of about $3 billion. The Santa Clara firewall security company (NYSE:PANW) is valued at about $13.5 billion today.
