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What is Sequoia Capital?

Updated August 2026. Evergreen page — refreshed in place as facts change.

If venture capital has a canonical firm, it's Sequoia: five decades of backing era-defining companies, from the Apple II to modern AI. Here's the history, the current structure, and why 'Sequoia led the round' still moves markets of attention.

From semiconductors to everything

Don Valentine — a Fairchild and National Semiconductor veteran — founded Sequoia in 1972, applying an operator's eye to the question 'who will buy this?' His early bets included Atari and a young Apple Computer. Successive leadership generations (Valentine to Doug Leone and Michael Moritz, then to Roelof Botha) kept the firm at the center of each platform shift: PCs, networking, internet, mobile, cloud, and now AI.

The hit list is genuinely absurd: Cisco, Oracle, Yahoo, Google, PayPal, YouTube, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Airbnb, Stripe, Zoom, Nvidia. Multiple generations of the S&P 500's largest companies took early Sequoia money.

The 2022–2024 restructuring

Two structural moves defined Sequoia's recent era. In 2021–2022 it reorganized its US/Europe business around the Sequoia Capital Fund, an open-ended evergreen vehicle holding public positions past IPO instead of distributing them — a break from the traditional ten-year fund clock. And by mid-2024 it completed the separation of its global arms: US/Europe kept the Sequoia name, India/Southeast Asia became Peak XV Partners, and China became HongShan.

For founders, the practical entity is Sequoia's US/Europe business — seed through growth, with programs like Arc for company-building at the earliest stage.

The culture: prepared minds and pattern breaks

Sequoia's internal vocabulary — 'prepared mind' memos anticipating where markets go, the famous early-COVID 'Black Swan' warnings to founders — reflects a house style: anticipatory, intense, and unsentimental. The firm is known for backing outsiders and immigrants disproportionately, a Valentine-era pattern it wears proudly, and for expecting portfolio companies to match its own operating intensity.

What Sequoia's backing signals

The brand effect is real: recruiting, later-round pricing, and press all move when Sequoia leads. The obligations are real too — Sequoia's economics, like all top-tier venture, need enormous outcomes, and its partners engage accordingly. Founders describe the relationship as demanding in the way good coaching is demanding.

In crypto, the firm has been active across cycles — an early Coinbase-era investor and a continuing backer of digital-asset infrastructure — making it one of the traditional giants with genuine on-chain exposure.