Sequoia Raises $10 Billion, Closes London Office and Kills Scouts

Sequoia Capital has raised roughly $10 billion in new funds while simultaneously shutting its London office, killing its Arc accelerator and Scouts program, merging its early-stage and growth teams, flattening the partnership, and ending the Monday partner meeting. The firm announced the changes Wednesday morning in a memo posted to X, titled "The Sequoia of Tomorrow."

The framing looks forward, but the substance is a rewind. Sequoia says it is coming out of a roughly 20-year expansionary phase in which it built multiple businesses across multiple geographies. An unintended side effect, the firm writes, was hierarchy. Nearly everything being dismantled now was built during that stretch, under a line of stewards running from Doug Leone through Jim Goetz to Roelof Botha.

What does this change for founders?

The most surprising casualties are the two programs that put Sequoia closest to young founders. Scouts, launched around 2009, gave small checks to founders and operators to invest on the firm's behalf — a way to see deals through people closer to promising newcomers than any partner could be. Anecdotally, half the industry has since copied it in some form. Jason Calacanis famously pointed Sequoia to Uber through the program. Sam Altman brought in Stripe. Early scouts included Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and Dropbox founders Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston.

Arc, launched in March 2022, was Sequoia's answer to Y Combinator: a batch accelerator for pre-seed and seed founders, running several cohorts a year over seven weeks, with admitted companies receiving $500,000 to $1 million up front. Both programs were bets on being early and being everywhere. Now, Sequoia says it wants to put more energy behind fewer people and things.

The London closure lands hardest on European founders. Sequoia opened the office in 2020, and several people will leave the firm as a result. "We simply don't see the need for a local presence," the memo says, adding that Europe will keep producing "outlier founders" whom Sequoia can support from the Bay Area. Founders who didn't already feel pressure to relocate to the Bay Area or open an office there will now.

Luciana Lixandru, hired from Accel in 2020 as Sequoia's first partner in Europe, says she was offered a move to San Francisco and declined. "Europe is where my family is, and where I want to build," she wrote on X. She says she remains a partner, will keep her board seats, and will keep investing personally in European founders.

For Europe's startup scene, the message stings — particularly since Andreessen Horowitz closed its own London office last year and Coatue retreated in 2024. Sequoia didn't say it won't fund European companies, but the memo clearly reinforces that the center of gravity sits once again in the Bay Area.

Who runs Sequoia now?

The memo names seven general partners who primarily own and operate the firm: Alfred Lin and Pat Grady — the co-stewards — along with Andrew Reed, Shaun Maguire, Konstantine Buhler, Sonya Huang, and David Cahn, who joined in 2023. The memo also says the team has "reinvigorated the GOAT," Doug Leone, and confirms former Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach is back in the fold as a full-time partner, a return he made in March.

Two names shift off the investing bench. Jess Lee, Sequoia's first female partner and the early-stage investor who oversaw Arc, no longer appears on the investor page; she stays as chief product officer. Stephanie Zahn, an investor who joined in 2015, has left entirely to launch her own firm, which she announced last month.

Sequoia rarely cuts ties cleanly. Founder Don Valentine kept turning up at partner meetings for roughly a decade after handing over the firm, and Goetz, who stepped back from management duties in 2017, still appears on the site. Botha is the exception: voted out as senior steward last fall in a surprise shake-up the firm framed as a handoff to Lin and Grady, he cut his remaining ties this summer, around the time he joined SpaceX's board.

One team, no Monday meeting

Structurally, Sequoia is dispensing with its separate "early" and "growth" team approaches to operate as one. The Monday partner meeting — a ritual at Sequoia and nearly every firm — is finished. The stated logic: founders operate around the clock, and their investors should too. That ritual may be fading more broadly; Benchmark's entire team told TechCrunch at Disrupt last month that it now mostly uses Monday meetings to socialize.

Sequoia acknowledges the moves carry a cost. "It is scary to break something that's already working just fine," the memo says, and it's painful to say goodbye to good people.

None of this is entirely out of character. Sequoia iterates routinely, and sometimes that has meant retreating — most notably its 2023 split from its China and India/Southeast Asia arms, which became HongShan and Peak XV, ending a two-decade run as a global franchise under one name. The firm's own stated objective function is "not scale, but quality." With $10 billion in fresh capital and a smaller bench, the bet is that conviction beats coverage.