Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley firm that backed Apple, Airbnb and Stripe early, is closing its London office and shutting two of its best-known programmes for early founders, it said on 4 November in a memo titled "The Sequoia of Tomorrow", TechCrunch and City AM report. At the same time, the firm says it has raised about $10 billion in new funds.
TechCrunch describes the changes as Sequoia undoing roughly 20 years of expansion and returning to a smaller, more focused firm. "Our objective function is not scale, but quality," the memo says.
What is closing
- London: the office opened in 2020 with Luciana Lixandru, hired from Accel, and had grown to six partners by 2023, City AM reports. "We are closing our London office, which means several people will be leaving Sequoia," the memo says. The firm has not said how many.
- Arc: the batch accelerator launched in March 2022, with seven-week cohorts and $500,000 to $1 million for each admitted company, according to TechCrunch.
- Scouts: the programme, started around 2009, gave founders and operators small cheques to invest for Sequoia. TechCrunch notes that Uber and Stripe both reached the firm through scouts.
Sequoia is also merging its separate early-stage and growth teams, flattening its partnership and dropping its Monday partner meetings. Seven general partners will own and run the firm: Alfred Lin and Pat Grady as co-stewards, with Andrew Reed, Shaun Maguire, Konstantine Buhler, Sonya Huang and David Cahn, TechCrunch reports. Lixandru declined to move to San Francisco; she stays a partner, keeps her board seats and will invest personally in European founders.
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Sequoia says it still expects great companies from outside the US. "We believe that Europe will continue to produce outlier founders and companies," the memo says, but "we simply don't see the need for a local presence". Those founders will be backed from the Bay Area.
It is the latest big US investor to step back from London: Andreessen Horowitz closed its office there last year and Coatue pulled back from Europe in 2024, TechCrunch reports. In 2023 Sequoia had already split off its China and India and Southeast Asia arms, which now operate as HongShan and Peak XV. Sequoia remains one of the biggest backers of AI start-ups; it led the Series E of the AI inference company fal, which raised again this week.
