sequoia-capital
(59)
Warren Hogarth and the trouble with looking good on paper
He had a Harvard MBA and money in the bank. Getting a car loan was another matter. The Tilt co-founder has spent the years since asking what lenders fail to see.
Mark Kvamme and the money that stayed in Ohio
He left Silicon Valley for a job in Ohio and kept finding reasons to stay. Now Mark Kvamme is building an investment fund around a question that has followed him ever since: what could Ohio build if more of its capital stayed home?
Borge Hald and the business of hearing what you would rather not hear
Borge Hald and Amy Pressman built Medallia around a simple frustration: companies could count their customers without understanding them. His own education in listening ran from hotel desks to investor meetings - with a reading assignment waiting in reception.
Brian Halligan and the business of keeping the crowd
A Grateful Dead fan helped turn inbound marketing into a software company. Brian Halligan’s next lesson was harder: getting people to show up is only the beginning.
Ravi Gupta keeps the bad slide
The former Instacart CFO and COO carries an old board deck into new conversations. His route from Chicago to Sequoia and Ithaca explains why he puts so much faith in focus, candor, and the people beside him.
Sravanth Aluru
Sravanth Aluru is the co-founder and CEO of Avataar, a generative AI company building spatial storytelling and 3D visualization tools for enterprises and e-commerce. An IIT Bombay engineer and Wharton MBA, he moved from a program manager role at Microsoft to technology investment banking on Wall Street before founding Avataar in 2014. He holds more than 10 US patents across AI, computer vision, and mobile data transmission, and has raised over $55 million from investors including Tiger Global, Peak XV (Sequoia Capital India). Under his leadership Avataar has shifted from interactive 3D product experiences toward AI-generated product video, serving customers such as HP, Victoria's Secret, Lowe's, Samsung, and Sleep Number.
Auctor
Auctor is a New York-based AI company building an 'AI system of action' for the enterprise software implementation lifecycle. Its platform captures customer requirements from conversations and decisions, then auto-generates execution-ready artifacts - proposals, statements of work, business requirements documents, user stories, resource plans, cost estimates and process diagrams - while keeping teams synchronized from discovery through delivery. Aimed at system integrators and professional services firms, Auctor reports up to 80% efficiency gains in discovery and design. Founded in 2025 by four Johns Hopkins dropouts, the company emerged from stealth in April 2026 with $20M led by Sequoia Capital.
WithCoverage
WithCoverage is a New York-based insurtech that replaces the traditional commission-based insurance broker with a flat-fee, AI-enabled risk management team. Its platform pairs licensed insurance experts, attorneys and claims specialists with an AI audit engine that scans policies and operations to find hidden exposures, run competitive carrier bidding, and cut premiums - routinely saving clients over $100,000 a year. Founded in 2023 by Opendoor co-founder JD Ross and Compound alumnus Max Brenner, the company has replaced brokers for 550+ fast-growing businesses including Gopuff, Bombas, Blank Street and Eight Sleep, and raised a $42M Series B in January 2026 co-led by Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures.
George Eliadis
George Eliadis is the co-founder and CEO of Probook, a New York based company building an AI operating system for home services businesses such as HVAC, plumbing, and electrical contractors. A 24-year-old Wharton graduate who spent six summers pressure washing homes in upstate New York with his father, he started Probook to fix the operational problems he lived through in the field. In June 2026 the company raised a $40 million round, combining a $34 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and a $6 million seed led by Sequoia Capital, and it now serves hundreds of clients across more than 35 states.
William Sun
William Sun is the co-founder and CEO of Auctor, a New York AI company building the 'system of action' for enterprise software implementation. He dropped out of Johns Hopkins - where he studied biomedical engineering and computer science - and left a job at Meta to start the company, which he built with three co-founders drawn from Google, AWS, Apple, ServiceNow and NASA. In April 2026 Auctor emerged from stealth with a $20M Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with backers including Microsoft's M12, HubSpot Ventures, Workday Ventures, OneStream, Tercera and Y Combinator. Auctor's AI agents capture discovery calls and workshops, turn them into structured requirements, and generate the artifacts - SOWs, proposals, architecture docs, user stories - that consultants used to hand-build over weeks.
Kais Khimji
Kais Khimji is the co-founder and CEO of Blockit AI, an autonomous calendar-scheduling agent that negotiates meeting times over email and Slack. A former six-year partner at Sequoia Capital and Harvard alum, he revived a student-era idea about why calendars don't talk to each other, raised a $5M seed led by Pat Grady at Sequoia, and now serves more than 200 companies including Brex, Together.ai, Rogo, a16z, Accel, and Index.
Dev Nag
Dev Nag is the founder and CEO of QueryPal, a San Francisco AI company rebuilding the economics of customer support with agentic automation. A serial founder with deep machine-learning roots, he earlier created Wavefront, the real-time cloud monitoring platform acquired by VMware in 2017, where he went on to launch VMware's flagship AIOps product. He also founded the observability startup CtrlStack, backed by Sequoia Capital and Engineering Capital. Before founding companies he was an engineer at Google, PayPal, and eBay and the founding engineer at securities-trading platform GLMX. Stanford-trained in both mathematics and psychology, he holds more than a dozen AI and security patents and authored one of the most widely read beginner tutorials in deep learning, 'GANs in 50 lines of code.'
Nick Fleisher
Nick Fleisher is the co-founder and CEO of Sandstone, the first platform built for AI-native in-house legal departments. An engineer who once tried to drop out of college to build apps, he later led McKinsey's legal tech and AI practice in New York before reuniting with his freshman-year roommate and a lawyer-turned-engineer to launch Sandstone in 2025. The company raised a $10M seed round led by Sequoia Capital and runs out of Brooklyn, where Fleisher is betting that institutional legal knowledge can become a company's competitive advantage instead of a bottleneck.
Renate Nyborg
Renate Nyborg is the founder and CEO of Meeno, a generative-AI app teaching people - mostly young men - how to build real relationships, which she frames as a fight against loneliness she rates 'on par with climate change.' She was the first woman to run Tinder and previously led Apple's App Store subscriptions in Europe and built Headspace's first international product and marketing org. Half Norwegian, half Dutch, raised across four countries and fluent in five languages, she studied philosophy at Cambridge in her third language. Meeno has raised about $5 million from Sequoia, Andrew Ng's AI Fund and NEA, and has pivoted from text advice toward voice-based practice scenarios it calls the 'Duolingo of dating.'
Pieter de Villiers
Pieter de Villiers is the Co-Founder and CEO of Clickatell, the company that invented the world's first SMS API in 2000 with four lines of code and went on to pioneer chat banking and chat commerce globally. Based in Stellenbosch, South Africa, he led Clickatell to become the first African startup backed by Sequoia Capital, raised over $118 million in total funding, and built a platform that processes roughly 9 billion messages monthly for more than 10,000 enterprise clients across 220+ countries. He also chairs SiMODiSA, a non-profit focused on digital skills development and startup acceleration in Africa.
Caroline Clark
Caroline Clark is the CEO and co-founder of Arcade, the San Francisco software company that turned the dreaded product demo into something people actually want to watch. After product marketing at Atlassian and a stint at Sequoia Capital, she started Arcade in 2021 to kill the screenshots-and-gifs grind she lived through firsthand. Today more than 14,000 companies, from Salesforce to Zapier to Carta, build interactive demos and AI-generated product videos on Arcade, which raised a $14M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins in November 2024. Clark borrows the feel of video games, pulsating dots, satisfying load times, to make B2B software feel like play, and runs the company on a borrowed Sequoia creed: rigor, discipline, and focus on quality.
Duncan Haldane
Duncan Haldane is the co-founder and CEO of JITX, a Berkeley-born startup that lets electrical engineers design circuit boards by writing code instead of dragging lines on a screen. Before software, he built robots: at UC Berkeley he created two Guinness World Record machines - the X2-VelociRoACH, the fastest robot relative to its size, and Salto, the most vertically agile jumping robot ever built. He holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from Berkeley and started JITX in 2017 because he wanted a faster way to design the hardware inside his robots.
Eric Marcotulli
Eric Marcotulli is the co-founder and CEO of Elysium Health, a New York consumer health company he started in 2014 to turn academic aging research into products people can actually buy. A former wrestler who became Sequoia Capital's youngest partner before he turned 30, he left venture capital after a business-school case study on cellular aging convinced him that longevity was a solvable engineering problem, not a fairy tale. He built Elysium by recruiting Nobel laureates and a roster of world-class scientists as advisors, raising more than $70 million across several rounds, and selling directly to consumers.
Michael Manapat
Michael Manapat is the co-founder and CEO of Rowspace, an AI platform that turns a finance firm's proprietary data into compounding decision-making edge. He built the machine learning behind Stripe Radar, the fraud engine that scans every card payment across the Stripe network, then spent three and a half years as CTO of Notion driving its push into AI. A mathematics PhD from MIT and former Google engineer, he launched Rowspace in February 2026 with $50M backed by Sequoia and Emergence Capital, already serving roughly ten top private equity and credit firms managing hundreds of billions in assets.
Ali Amin-Javaheri
Ali Amin-Javaheri is the co-founder and CEO of Knowde, the B2B digital marketplace and data platform transforming how the $5 trillion global chemicals industry does business online. With 11 years of experience at ChemPoint - where he helped scale the chemical distribution startup to over $400M in revenue - Ali built Knowde from a PowerPoint vision into a platform hosting 8,000+ supplier storefronts and 230,000+ chemical products. Backed by Sequoia Capital, Coatue, and Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher's fund), Knowde has raised $180.8M total, including a $60M Series C in August 2024. Ali's drive is deeply personal: his father Mehdi fled Iran in 1985 and struggled to find work commensurate with his chemical engineering degree, and Ali grew up reading chemistry trade magazines, determined to modernize an industry built on relationships and paper catalogs.
Assaf Resnick
Assaf Resnick is the co-founder and CEO of BigPanda, an AI-powered IT operations platform valued at $1.2 billion. Born in Israel and raised in Silicon Valley, he spent six years as a principal investor at Sequoia Capital Israel before leaving to build BigPanda in 2012. After pivoting from ad-tech and surviving years of near-silence in the market, BigPanda found product-market fit with large enterprises and has raised over $330 million in total funding. Today the company leads the emerging category of agentic IT operations, helping enterprise teams automate the detection, investigation, and resolution of IT incidents.
Nellie Wartoft
Nellie Wartoft is a Swedish technology entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Tigerhall, a Change Activation Platform that helps Fortune 500 companies drive organizational transformation at scale using AI and social learning. She moved from a small Swedish village to Singapore at 18 with a one-way ticket, spent 4.5 years as a top billing recruiter at Michael Page, then built Tigerhall from scratch into a platform operating across 32 countries, backed by Sequoia Capital and Monk's Hill Ventures with over $10 million in venture capital. Before her tech career she was a Swedish national champion in skeet shooting and air rifle.
Amir Sadeghian
Amir Sadeghian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Astrocade, the world's first agentic AI game creation platform that lets anyone build fully playable games from a text prompt. A Stanford PhD in Computer Vision and AI, Sadeghian previously co-founded Aibee Inc. - a Sequoia-backed AI unicorn - before teaming up with his brother Ali Sadeghian and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li to build Astrocade. The platform has amassed 20 million users and 140 million monthly game plays across 80 countries within 8 months of launch, backed by $68M from Sequoia Capital, Sea, NVIDIA, Google, and Eric Schmidt.
Abhishek Malani
Abhishek Malani is a Partner on Sequoia Capital's Growth team, based in New York. A Harvard Economics magna cum laude graduate (Class of 2022), he spent three years at Silver Lake Partners as a private equity associate before joining Sequoia in June 2025. He focuses on companies at inflection points - where market timing, product strength, and team ambition converge. His notable investments include Kalshi (federally regulated event trading, $22B valuation Series F) and Juicebox (AI recruiting platform, $30M Series A). He looks for founders who are deeply obsessed with their problem and willing to take bold action while staying open to course correction.
Tammie Siew
Tammie Siew is a General Partner and Co-Founder at Pebblebed, a San Francisco-based deep tech venture capital firm focused on foundational infrastructure—AI simulation engines, robot operating systems, developer platforms, and formal verification systems. A Cornell-educated economist and literature scholar who spent years investing at Sequoia Capital Singapore before co-founding a healthcare startup, she brings a rare operator-investor lens to backing the infrastructure layer of next-generation technology. Pebblebed's Fund II closed at $125M in 2024, with roughly 35 investments backing companies like Augment Code, OpenMind, Zeromatter, Lemurian Labs, and Logical Intelligence.
Ben Liu
Ben Liu is the CEO of Pocket Gems, a San Francisco-based mobile entertainment company backed by Tencent and Sequoia Capital. After joining as COO in 2011 and becoming CEO in 2012, he has led the company's flagship titles — the interactive storytelling platform Episode (with 25 million+ registered creators) and the real-time 3D strategy game War Dragons — while overseeing $155 million in total fundraising, mostly from Tencent. A Stanford double-degree and MBA graduate, Liu brings a rare hybrid background spanning investment banking, Disney strategy, EA mobile product management, and social gaming before betting on the mobile-first future of entertainment.
Sanchali Pal
Sanchali Pal is the Founder and CEO of Commons (formerly Joro), an Oakland-based climate action app that connects personal spending data to carbon footprints and rewards users for making sustainable choices. A Princeton and Harvard Business School alumna who spent six years tracking her own carbon footprint in a spreadsheet before building the app to scale that insight for everyone, she has grown Commons to 450,000+ community members, raised $14.7M including a $10M Series A backed by Sequoia Capital and Jay-Z's Arrive, earned a TIME100 Most Influential Companies listing, and is on a mission to prove that climate action and financial wellbeing are the same thing.
Nick Elprin
Nick Elprin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Domino Data Lab, the enterprise MLOps platform trusted by 20% of the Fortune 100. A Harvard computer science graduate who spent seven years as a senior technologist and quantitative researcher at Bridgewater Associates, he co-founded Domino in 2013 to solve the scaling problem he witnessed firsthand: companies could start data science projects but couldn't industrialize them. Under his leadership, Domino has raised $226+ million, been named a Gartner Magic Quadrant Visionary, and become the infrastructure layer for AI in regulated industries including pharma, financial services, and defense. Elprin is also a decade-long meditation practitioner and a vocal advocate for the irreplaceable role of human intelligence in data science.
Nick Noone
Nick Noone is the co-founder and CEO of Peregrine, a San Francisco-based public safety data platform that unifies fragmented law enforcement data into a single system for real-time search, analysis, and decision-making. A Stanford-trained economist and statistician and former Palantir executive who led special operations data systems used by 18,000+ personnel across six continents, Noone co-founded Peregrine in 2017 to bring the same data-activation philosophy to local law enforcement. By early 2025, Peregrine had raised $250 million - including a $190M Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $2.5 billion valuation - and serves agencies covering more than 80 million Americans.
Anas Biad
Anas Biad is a Partner at Sequoia Capital based in London, where he invests in early-to-growth-stage companies across enterprise software, AI, SaaS, gaming, and fintech. A mathematics graduate of Ecole Polytechnique who grew up in Casablanca, he spent time at Bain & Company and Silver Lake before joining Sequoia in 2021 as one of its first European partners. He backs founders building enduring companies across Europe and is known for his passion for gaming, quantum computing, and his admiration for Richard Feynman.