Meet the Venture Capitalists · Firm Profile
Sequoia Capital
States it seeks exceptional founders with a unique insight in a market poised for large growth, and that it is more interested in what might be possible than in a working product or existing customers. Partnered with Stripe before it processed a transaction.
Criteria: Clarity of thought, category creation, gigantic markets, and a view on both how and why now. States it typically does not take board seats at seed, works with SAFEs and convertible notes, and tends to avoid party rounds that lack a real lead. States that since 2010 about 75 percent of Sequoia-backed seed companies went on to raise a Series A, which it describes as two to three times the peer average.
What this means for your pitchApproach a year before you need money. They document multi-year courtships, meeting Thumbtack's founders three years and Square's eighteen months before investing, and passing at seed on DoorDash and Instacart before backing them later. A first meeting is not a pitch, it is the opening of a file.
Sequoia and seed investingChecked 16 August 2026
From Sequoia Capital's own site and announcements · checked 26 August 2026 · selective, not comprehensive · verify on the firm's pages
Sequoia led Corma's seed round. Corma trains a foundation model that powers defensive cybersecurity agents operating across enterprise security tools, and the firm states the product uncovered and contained an active attacker campaign within its first hour deployed at one customer.
Sequoia led Preview's seed round. Preview is a video creation workspace for professional creators that combines a video timeline with an infinite canvas for ideation, and the firm states more than 100 studios already use it.
Sequoia announced it is co-leading the first funding round of Ineffable Intelligence, an AI research lab founded by David Silver. The lab is building what it calls a superlearner, a system that learns through its own experience rather than from human data.