Sequoia Publications

All Systems Nominal By Harry Spitzer Published May 21, 2026 How a former Navy officer’s will to serve is shaping the future of hardware development Although Cameron McCord wasn’t himself present at Edwards Air Force Base, what was about to transpire that May 2025 day in the Mojave Desert would still make it one he would never forget. AJ Piplica, CEO of Hermeus, was huddled with his team on the tarmac. No matter the outcome of the day’s flight test, he too was going to have a company-

AI Ascent 2026AI Ascent IV was our biggest and best year yet. By Team Sequoia Published May 8, 2026 On April 20, we hosted our fourth annual AI Ascent in San Francisco, bringing together more than 150 leading founders and researchers in AI, including Demis Hassabis, Andrej Karpathy, Greg Brockman, Boris Cherny of Anthropic, Dmitri Dolgov of Waymo, Jim Fan of Nvidia, and many more.Sequoia partner Pat Grady opened the day with a frame for the moment: AI is a revolution in computation. No

Standard Intelligence: Training General Intelligence in Pixel Space By Sonya Huang Published April 30, 2026 The future of useful agents may begin not with text, but with pixels. Could pixels hold the keys to training useful agents? The race to scale language models — and the agent ecosystem around them — is white-hot. Coding agents, which reason through problems and write code to solve them, have already taken us very far. But one ambitious young team is making a different bet:

Partnering with Ineffable Intelligence: A Superlearner for the Era of Experience By Sonya Huang and Alfred Lin Published April 27, 2026 David Silver is racing to build AI’s next chapter with an RL ‘superlearner.’ What does it mean to build a mind that is not a copy of our own? Today, we are excited to announce that Sequoia is partnering with David Silver and Ineffable Intelligence, a new AI research lab based in London with a singular mission: to make first contac

Partnering with Auctor: AI Autopilot for Software Implementation By Julien Bek Published April 15, 2026 Matt, Will and Sky. For every dollar spent on software, six are spent on services. Why? Because buying enterprise software is easy. Implementing it is hard, and still leans heavily on labour. Across the top 10 software ecosystems (ServiceNow, Salesforce, SAP, AWS, and others), 9 million implementation consultants represent more than $500 billion in annual labour spend, still growi

From Hierarchy to Intelligence By Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha Published March 31, 2026 At Sequoia, we see that speed is the best predictor of start-up success. Most companies are focused on AI as a productivity enhancer. Few are focused on the potential of AI to change how we work together. Block is showing what it looks like to fundamentally rethink organization design, ultimately harnessing AI to increase speed as a compounding competitive advantage. Two thousand years before the

Partnering with Edra: Context for Agents at ScaleEugen, Yannis and their team are turning enterprise knowledge into dynamic context that makes AI agents dramatically more effective. By Luciana Lixandru Published March 18, 2026 TEAM EDRA. Every company runs differently. Two businesses in the same industry will have their own escalation paths, and workarounds—their own tribal knowledge accumulated over years and stored, if anywhere, in the institutional memory of people who won’t alwa

Partnering with Scanner: Every Log Tells a Story—If You Can Find It Fast EnoughCliff and Steven are making petabytes of security data searchable in seconds, and opening the door to a new era of AI-driven security operations. By Bogomil Balkansky Published March 10, 2026 Steven and Cliff. A while back, I was deep in research on the next generation of security infrastructure, talking to CISOs and security engineers at some of the most technically sophisticated companies in Silicon Val

Services: The New Software By Julien Bek Published March 5, 2026 The next $1T company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm.  Every founder building an AI tool is asking the same question: what happens when the next version of Claude makes my product a feature? They’re right to worry. If you sell the tool, you’re in a race against the model. But if you sell the work, every improvement in the model makes your service faster, cheaper, and harder to compete wi

Partnering with FiretigerWith code shipping at a breakneck pace, how does observability keep up? Rustam and Achille built agents to watch the agents. By Lauren Reeder Published February 18, 2026 AI was supposed to make our lives easier. Yes, it can write our code for us. AI generates about half of Google’s code, while companies like Anthropic rely on agents close to 100 percent of the time. But as that code stacks up, it’s harder and harder to tell when your product is doing the ri

The Opening, Midgame and Endgame in StartupsWhy the best founders are “time travelers” who play all three phases simultaneously By David Cahn Published February 11, 2026 In the Prod community, they talk about founders as “time travelers” rather than visionaries. Founders don’t see the future, they teleport there. I think this is true in more ways than first meets the eye. To extend the analogy of a chess game (which I recently used in an essay on the AI race and which Will Manidis a

Partnering with Waymo to Reshape how the World Moves By Konstantine Buhler and Abhishek Malani Published February 2, 2026 1,190,000. That’s the number of road traffic deaths in a year. They are a leading cause of death for children and young adults worldwide.  Ninety percent. That’s the reduction in serious injury crashes Waymo has achieved across 127 million fully autonomous miles. The technology to prevent most of these tragedies isn’t theoretical anymore. It&

Partnering With Flapping AirplanesBuilding the “young person’s AGI lab” to unlock data efficient models, which we believe is the bottleneck to laddering up the next rung of AI intelligence By David Cahn Published January 28, 2026 Sometimes you meet a founder who is so good that you want to back them no matter what they are working on. Just as rarely, you meet a company whose vision is so singular, it feels both inevitable and differentiated at the same time. When I first sat down with

Partnering with Pace: Making Work Weightless By Bryan Schreier and Lauren Reeder Published January 27, 2026 Team Pace. It’s 9 a.m. on a Tuesday. A 300-page claims submission lands in your inbox. Your coffee goes cold as you settle in for the next three hours: reading, cross-referencing clauses and data to preserve the web of relationships, and hopping between dozens of screens typing, validating, and re-entering information. You send one piece off to one team and another to a

The Most Precious Resource Kais, Blockit, and Optimizing Time By Pat Grady Published January 22, 2026 Adding Value People and markets. These are the two core primitives in our business. Investing in a Person In 2019 we invested in Kais Khimji – not as a founder, but as a partner. Here is an excerpt from our investment thesis on Kais: Long term, Kais has a chance to be exceptional. Dating back to high school, he has always been the hardest worker in the room. His appe

2026: This is AGI By Pat Grady and Sonya Huang Published January 14, 2026 Saddle up: Your dreams for 2030 just became possible for 2026. Years ago, some leading researchers told us that their objective was AGI. Eager to hear a coherent definition, we naively asked “how do you define AGI?”. They paused, looked at each other tentatively, and then offered up what’s since become something of a mantra in the field of AI: “well, we each kind of have our own definitions, but we’ll know it wh