Julien
Bek

The Story

He was 18 years old in Geneva when he decided to sell e-cigarettes. Not because e-cigarettes were obviously going to be big - they weren't yet - but because he could see a market forming before the crowd noticed it. That early habit of spotting the thing right before it becomes the thing is now Julien Bek's professional superpower at Sequoia Capital, where he's one of the London office's founding partners on the early-stage team.

That teenage venture became E-clope, one of Europe's very first e-cigarette companies. It didn't become a unicorn. But it sharpened something that would matter a great deal later: the ability to look at a market that doesn't quite exist yet and see its shape clearly enough to move on it. Most investors want proof. Bek has always wanted the pattern.

At Global Founders Capital, he was based in London and San Francisco - the two cities that defined European tech ambition in the mid-2010s. He backed Revolut in its Series A round in 2016. At the time, Revolut was a scrappy currency exchange app with a bright purple card and no banking licence. Today it's valued at over $45 billion. The timing wasn't luck. It was a specific read on what European consumers actually wanted from financial services, made before anyone had the data to prove it.

Accel came next. He joined in 2018 as a partner focused on fintech, collaboration, and productivity - three categories that would collide spectacularly with COVID. He helped lead the investment in Hopin, the virtual events platform that became one of the fastest-growing companies in history before the pandemic tailwinds disappeared. He also backed Melio, the B2B payments company for small businesses, and worked closely with the teams at Miro and BeReal. Four very different bets, four companies that became breakout names.

In September 2023, Sequoia called. He joined as a partner in London - one of the first hires as the firm built out its early-stage European presence. The brief: find the companies that matter before they obviously matter. The portfolio is taking shape: Dust (enterprise AI for teams), Rillet (AI-native accounting), Tacto (procurement software), and Lemni, which raised a $4M pre-seed in early 2025.

Then, in March 2026, he published something that spread far beyond the usual VC-essay circuit. "Services: The New Software" laid out a thesis that was equal parts precise and provocative: the next trillion-dollar company won't sell software. It will sell the outcome. It will use AI to automate the delivery of services that humans currently perform - legal work, accounting, financial analysis, insurance brokerage - and price itself on results rather than seats. Fortune ran a feature on it. Founders rewrote their pitch decks. The debate continues.

The Geneva teenager who once built an e-cigarette company before e-cigarettes were a thing is now, at one of the world's most consequential venture capital firms, asking the same question he always has: what does the market want before it knows it wants it?