Cornelius
Menke

The Long Way Into the Room

He was inside Klarna's CFO office when Sequoia Capital first came calling - not for him, but for Klarna. That front-row seat to what a tier-one VC relationship actually looks like, from the portfolio company's side, is what made Cornelius Menke's eventual move to Sequoia feel less like a career pivot and more like following a map he'd already memorized.

Menke is German. He studied at the Stockholm School of Economics - one of those institutions where half the student body ends up running something and the other half ends up funding it. While there in 2017-2018, he took a position inside Klarna. Not as a summer intern making decks. Inside the CFO office, close to the numbers, during one of the most consequential periods in European fintech. Sequoia had already backed Klarna. Menke watched what that partnership looked like up close.

After Stockholm he went to Boston Consulting Group - the consulting firm's consulting firm. BCG trained him in the thing that separates good investors from great ones: the ability to rapidly pattern-match across industries, extract structural dynamics from noisy data, and form a view before anyone else has finished their analysis. Four years of that, then Sequoia came back into his life. This time with a job offer.

In September 2022, Sequoia announced Menke as its fifth partner hire in Europe. The London desk was small by design - a tight team with global brand gravity and a mandate to find Europe's next generation of category-defining companies before the rest of the field noticed them. Menke's job: cover the industrial economy, the physical world's transition to software, and any startup bold enough to reimagine a sector that had been running on legacy assumptions for decades.

His investment thesis crystallized early and stayed consistent: industrial transformation driven by supply chain shock and the race to net zero. The pandemic had scrambled global supply chains. Europe's manufacturing base - Germany's in particular - was reckoning with labor shortages, energy costs, and geopolitical pressure to localize. Menke saw this not as a crisis to hedge against, but as a forcing function for ten years of overdue innovation.

So he backed Robco - a Munich startup that sells modular robotics to the German SMEs that couldn't afford traditional automation (think: robots as high-tech Lego sets, deployed in days, not months). He backed Tacto alongside Luciana Lixandru and Julien Bek - a procurement software company that raised a €50M Series A co-led by Sequoia and Index Ventures. He backed Pennylane in European fintech. He co-invested in LangChain, the AI application framework that became infrastructure for an entire generation of AI builders, and in Flow, which was reimagining hardware manufacturing with software-defined agility.

By 2025, his most recent public deal was Rillet - an AI-native ERP platform designed to rebuild the CFO stack from scratch. The thesis: "We have seen decades of fintech innovation focused on payments and consumer banking, but the CFO stack has remained largely untouched." Sequoia led the $25M Series A. Within months, Rillet had raised a $70M Series B. The conviction was vindicated fast.

Alongside investing, Menke ran Sequoia Arc for European founders - a seven-week company-building immersion for pre-seed and seed-stage companies, offering $500K-1M in funding at the start of the program. Arc is where Sequoia gets founders before they're anyone - and it requires the kind of mentor who can hold a room of founders who are smart enough to be skeptical of generic advice. Menke did it across multiple cohorts.

He also wrote - prolifically by VC standards. A co-authored deep dive on autonomous AI agents in May 2023. A piece on the "AI Frontier Paradox" with Konstantine Buhler. A semi-technical exploration of what agentic systems actually require under the hood. He wrote about supply chain resilience and what it demands of procurement software. These weren't marketing pieces. They were frameworks, published before the consensus had formed.

By 2025-2026, Menke's time at Sequoia came to a close. He departed the firm. The Sequoia team page no longer lists him. His LinkedIn title reads: TBA | Former Partner at Sequoia Capital. Whatever comes next is unannounced - which, for a man whose instinct has been to move before the crowd, might be exactly the point.

Cornelius Menke spent three years helping one of the world's most storied venture firms understand what European technology looked like in the 2020s. He did it with the rigor of a consultant, the conviction of an investor, and the patience of someone who'd watched Klarna from the inside before anyone knew what Klarna would become. The next chapter is blank. That's usually where the interesting things start.