Sequoia Capital's Vision: Backing the Next Generation of AI-Powered Unicorns

Launching New Seed and Venture Funds for Legendary Companies

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our latest venture fund and our sixth dedicated seed fund, designed to partner with the next generation of outlier founders from day one.

There's something magical about forming partnerships in the earliest stages and watching them evolve. Initial ideas grow into legendary companies—from Apple to Nvidia to Stripe to Wiz. This fuels our excitement for the future. Today, founders face a once-in-a-generation opportunity as AI is set to reimagine every industry. We stand at the brink of a foundational platform shift as transformative as the rise of the internet. While tech supercycles bring both euphoria and disillusionment, looking back thirty years from now, we'll see generational companies that have reshaped our world in unimaginable ways.

We seek founders from any background worldwide who see possibility where others see limits, armed with the unshakable grit to turn impossibility into reality. As we launch our latest funds, our Early team shares emerging themes that excite them about the opportunities ahead.

Emerging Themes from Sequoia's Early Team

Lauren Reeder

Video and image models have advanced significantly in character consistency, crisp editing, and photorealism. This step change will enable a host of new applications, especially in consumer apps. We connect better and are more engaged by videos and images than text, paving the way for a new category of companies built on these models.

I'm also excited about the evolving infrastructure layer of the software development stack. With LLMs at the core, building applications has changed dramatically. As the app layer matures, new infrastructure primitives are needed for the next generation of applications.

Bogomil Balkansky

Security and observability are huge domains needing solutions. LLMs can't solve these problems off the shelf due to a lack of public training data. Since LLMs alone aren't enough, these fields are ripe for innovation with other forms of AI.

Josephine Chen

We're on the cusp of a new world of consumer apps. Platform shifts open new dimensions in how people live. Stablecoins will change how consumers interact with financial services. Healthcare will transform as people use LLMs to take control of their health. Step function changes in voice, video, and robotics will fundamentally shift how people interact with technology and each other.

Luciana Lixandru

I'm excited to meet founders using Europe as their product and engineering hub to take over the world. Europe's founder pool has never been stronger, with repeat entrepreneurs and alumni from breakout scaleups bringing hard-won judgment, world-class product taste, and global scaling experience.

Dean Meyer

Network security is undergoing a fundamental reset. The network is evolving with more distributed users, applications, and edge devices. AI accelerates this shift, multiplying request volumes. The next generation of network security will likely be identity-driven, built around users, devices, and AI agent permissions.

As more data centers come online, data center security becomes critical. AI workloads concentrate in specialized hardware, turning infrastructure into a new attack surface. Securing the new compute layer is essential.

Konstantine Buhler

E-commerce is ripe for reinvention with AI. There's a huge opportunity in usage revenue, where AI agents get paid for tasks, and new monetization for in-app purchases. OpenAI's service for research and buying products in chat apps is just the start. We see a multi-trillion dollar opportunity for commerce in AI and hope to back the next Amazon for the AI era.

2025 was the year voice AI went mainstream, but many industries, like financial services where 92% of fixed income is traded over the phone, still need solutions.

George Robson

I see potential in providing digital asset solutions to regulated financial institutions. Cryptocurrencies have been peripheral, but new regulations in the US and Europe allow institutions to buy and sell them. There's a mismatch between crypto expertise and that of large banks, creating opportunities for early-stage companies to bridge the gap.

Most medical data isn't used to accurately package and price products. For example, the UK has longitudinal electronic data since the 1980s, but it's underutilized for pricing medication, life insurance, etc. We're excited for teams tackling these problems.

Alfred Lin

Almost every industry will be disrupted by AI. History shows that technology waves like internet, mobile, and cloud brought business model transformations; AI will do the same. While AI has automated mundane work, we look forward to new creative ideas, business processes, consumer experiences, and ways to play that can be truly transformative.

Shaun Maguire

Silicon photonics has been a holy grail for decades and is finally happening as use cases explode. The bottleneck in AI is multiplying big matrices, which silicon photonics can do efficiently. Its impact in the next 50 years could rival silicon electronics in the last 50.

I'm also interested in partnering with founders in Israel. The tech ecosystem has matured, with Wiz being just the beginning. I like backing underestimated people, and the entire Israeli ecosystem is underestimated now.

Charlie Curnin

Having fun might be the most underrated use case for AI. Ten years ago, entertainment came from others making content; today, we make our own. From Suno to Sora, AI enables more creativity, delight, and participation in making, remixing, sharing, and consuming.

Julien Bek

The physical world represents 80% of global GDP. Companies winning in physical AI will become some of the largest globally. We're entering a hardware renaissance and excited to partner with pioneers in this new supercycle.

I'm also interested in AI Forward Deployed Engineers. For every $1 spent on software, up to $6 are spent on services. The services industry needs more human workers to deploy AI in production—a $500B growing labor market constrained by supply. AI can help humans be more productive, starting as co-pilots and evolving to autopilots.

Stephanie Zhan

As AI becomes superintelligent, it automates services and advances possibilities in every field, from coding to physical AI. Imagine AI transforming every industry: consumer, engineering, product, security, sales, marketing, finance, legal, medicine, education, manufacturing. We're living through the most exciting time in history.

Roelof Botha

I'm drawn to dynamo founders—polymaths with a voracious appetite for learning, blending interdisciplinary insights. They don't follow conventional paths; they're defiant and chart their own course. With today's AI tools, such founders can address problems in ways never before possible.