Sequoia Capital has raised about $10 billion in new funds and, in the same memo, announced a sweeping rollback of twenty years of expansion, the firm said on Wednesday, 4 November. It is closing its London office, shutting its Arc accelerator and Scouts programme, merging its early-stage and growth teams into one, and flattening its partnership under seven general partners.
## What Sequoia is cutting
The memo, titled ‘The Sequoia of Tomorrow’, frames the changes as a return to what the firm says it does best: high-conviction, highly selective venture investing. ‘Putting more energy behind fewer people and things means better support for the founders we back,’ it reads. The firm says two decades of expansion built hierarchy it no longer wants.
The cuts fall hardest on the programmes that kept Sequoia closest to young founders. Scouts, launched around 2009, gave founders and operators small checks to invest on the firm’s behalf, and famously pointed Sequoia to Uber and Stripe. Arc, launched in March 2022 as an answer to Y Combinator, ran seven-week cohorts for pre-seed and seed startups.
## London and the team
London is the most visible casualty. Sequoia opened the office in 2020 and hired Luciana Lixandru from Accel as its first European partner. She declined a move to San Francisco and will stay in Europe as a partner, keeping her board seats while investing personally. Several other people will leave as the office closes.
The partnership is being flattened at the same time. Seven general partners now own and operate the firm, led by co-stewards Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, with Andrew Reed, Shaun Maguire, Konstantine Buhler, Sonya Huang and David Cahn. The Monday partner meeting is gone, on the theory that founders work around the clock and investors should too.
## Our read
The contradiction is the story. A firm that just raised $10 billion is choosing to get smaller, not bigger, and it is doing so in public. That is a deliberate signal: Sequoia would rather back fewer companies with more attention than spread itself across every stage. The money proves it can afford the choice; the cuts prove it means it.
For founders, the practical change is narrower access. The two doors outsiders used most — a scout’s check or an Arc application — are now closed, and the London office is gone. Sequoia says European founders will still get world-class support from the Bay Area, but the centre of gravity has moved back to Silicon Valley.
## Why It Matters
Sequoia is the venture industry’s bellwether, and its retreat from global expansion follows a pattern. Andreessen Horowitz shut its London office in early 2025, and Coatue closed its own in 2024. When the largest firms all pull back to the Bay Area at once, European founders lose local champions and the funding map tilts further toward Silicon Valley.
The $10 billion also lands in a cooler funding climate. [OpenAI cut its funding target to $20 billion](https://geroundtable.com/openai-cuts-funding-target-20-billion/) after securing about $11 billion against a $30 billion goal, and [investors handed it a smaller check than it wanted](https://geroundtable.com/openai-smaller-check-funding-round/) as tech stocks slid. Sequoia raising record funds while others trim targets shows capital is concentrating, not disappearing.
## Background
Sequoia was founded in 1972 and backed Apple, Google and Nvidia in their early years. It spent two decades building a global franchise, then separated from its China and India arms in 2023. [Fal, whose Series E Sequoia led](https://geroundtable.com/fal-16-billion-inference-bottleneck/), doubled to a $16 billion valuation this month, a reminder of what selective bets can return.
Source: [Sequoia’s memo in full](https://bitcomme.com/sequoia-hits-rewind-undoing-20-years-of-expansion/) and [Hindu BusinessLine’s report](https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/companies/sequoia-capital-raises-10-billion-restructures-operations-to-focus-on-selective-investments/article71668503.ece)
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