Key facts
- Sequoia Capital said it has raised roughly $10 billion in new funds, according to its memo
- Sequoia is closing its London office, opened in 2020, and several people will leave the firm
- Sequoia is shutting its Arc accelerator, launched in March 2022, and its Scouts program
- Sequoia is merging its early-stage and growth teams and flattening its partnership
- Sequoia named seven general partners, with Alfred Lin and Pat Grady as co-stewards
Sequoia Capital posted a memo to X on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, titled "The Sequoia of Tomorrow," saying it has raised roughly $10 billion in new funds and is closing its London office, shutting its Arc accelerator and Scouts program, merging its early-stage and growth teams, flattening its partnership and ending its Monday partner meeting.
Sequoia described the moves as coming out of a roughly 20-year expansionary phase during which it built multiple businesses in multiple geographies. It said an unintended side effect was hierarchy, which required management of the operating side and crept into the investing team.
The firm said closing the London office, which it opened in 2020, means several people will leave. "We simply don't see the need for a local presence," the memo said, adding that Europe will keep producing outlier founders and that Sequoia can support them from the Bay Area. Luciana Lixandru, hired from Accel in 2020 as Sequoia's first partner in Europe, said she declined an offer to move to San Francisco, remains a partner and will keep her board seats while investing personally in European founders.
Scouts, launched around 2009, gave small checks to founders and operators to invest on the firm's behalf. The report said Jason Calacanis pointed Sequoia to Uber through the program and that Sam Altman brought Stripe to Sequoia as a scout. Arc, launched in March 2022, was a batch accelerator for pre-seed and seed founders running several cohorts a year for seven weeks, with admitted companies getting $500,000 to $1 million up front.
The memo named seven general partners who primarily own and operate Sequoia: Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, the firm's co-stewards, along with Andrew Reed, Shaun Maguire, Konstantine Buhler, Sonya Huang and David Cahn. It said Carl Eschenbach, former Workday CEO, returned as a full-time partner in March.
Jess Lee, the firm's first female partner and an early-stage investor who oversaw Arc, is no longer shown on Sequoia's investor page but remains with the firm as chief product officer. Stephanie Zahn, an investor who joined Sequoia in 2015, has left the firm and announced last month that she is launching her own firm.
Sequoia said in the memo: "It is scary to break something that's already working just fine." The report noted the changes follow Andreessen Horowitz closing its London office last year and Coatue retreating in 2024.