Sequoia Capital

?? New TEDAI Talk is Live! Stephanie Zhan: “Dreaming of Daily Life With Superintelligent AI” Why hasn’t AI transformed our day-to-day lives in more meaningful ways? Stephanie Zhan, partner at Sequoia Capital, takes the TEDAI San Francisco stage to explore the collective race to superintelligence, where AI moves beyond assistance to autonomy, and shows why the future of AI isn't just smart — it's transformative. ?? Watch the full TEDAI Talk now: https://lnkd.in/dtiHMeME #TEDAI #AIInnovation #FutureOfWork #Superintelligence #Founders #Startups #Sequoia #ArtificialIntelligence #TechLeadership #TEDTalks #AIEntrepreneurs #GenerativeAI #AIandSociety

The next trillion-dollar moat isn't patents or network effects—it's usage data. Google knew this 20 years ago. OpenAI built ChatGPT specifically for this reason. In AI, whoever crosses the data inflection point first is most likely to win, as competitors can't convince users to adopt inferior products long enough to catch up. Check out my latest newsletter for more thoughts on how usage data creates insurmountable advantages. ??

I’m officially launching my new company, Paid. We just raised €10M to solve the BIGGEST problem no one's talking about in AI. AI agents are growing fast, but all face a critical challenge: how to monetize and capture the value they create? Traditional software billing doesn’t solve this problem. At Paid, we're solving this problem by: ? Smart pricing that aligns with actual value creation ? Real-time margin tracking to ensure profitability ? Clear dashboards that demonstrate ROI to customers ? Billing, Invoicing, RevRec, taxes and all the back-office needs in a single pane of glass With just a few lines of code, AI builders can focus on creating amazing agents while we handle the business engine behind them. Huge thanks to EQT Ventures and Sequoia Capital for backing our vision alongside GTMfund, Exceptional Capital, Alt Capital, SV Angel, Founders Co-op, and others with €10M in pre-seed funding and to early partners LOGIC, Inc., VidLab7, Happy Robot, and Artisan. Join our beta: Paid.ai Let's GO! Innovate, Create, Get Paid ??

Excited to share that Sequoia Capital is leading Mercury's $300M Series C $500M revenue in 2024 10 straight quarters of GAAP profitability Winning hearts and minds of startups at formation 200,000+ businesses served Can't wait to see you build your 100-year plan Immad Akhund Jason Zhang cc Isaiah Boone William R. Why we invested: The bank account is the nucleus of business finance, where critical workflows begin and end. It is the first financial relationship a founder sets up, it is in the flow of funds, and it is the core “system of record” for a company’s money. Yet as personal banking has transitioned online, business banking has been left behind, especially for many startups and small businesses. There are tens of millions of these companies in the U.S. alone—consumer-like in scale, but with far more complex needs. The slow, often paper-based processes of incumbent banks simply can’t keep up. Thankfully, Mercury is a breath of fresh air: a simple, even joyful, product that integrates seamlessly into all of a company’s financial processes and brings the best of modern banking services to ambitious founders and business owners. Startup natives themselves, co-founders Immad Akhund, Jason Zhang and Max Tagher saw firsthand how difficult it was for Silicon Valley companies to access institutional banking services, so they launched Mercury in 2019 with the goal to make it easier. Six years later, Immad, Jason and Max have built the product they would’ve wanted back then. Happy customers tell us they’ve been delighted to open an account in less time than it would have taken to get just one email returned from a traditional bank, and they say Mercury has become a trusted partner as they build and scale their businesses. That trust has empowered the team to expand into other financial services as they continue to reimagine banking. Meanwhile, Mercury is also moving from Silicon Valley to Main Street, as the types of customers the platform serves expand in kind—both with the launch of the Mercury Personal waitlist, and as the company’s reputation for quality spreads across industries. Last year alone, Mercury handled more than $150 billion worth of transactions; today, it serves more than 200,000 businesses. We at Sequoia Capital are proud to lead Mercury's Series C and join their board as the team sets its sights even higher: on a comprehensive suite of commercial and personal banking services. Mercury’s vision for the future has already clearly resonated with its customers, and we believe the innovative spirit and operational excellence that brought them to this moment can drive their growth for years and decades to come. https://lnkd.in/eEHK3Cci

Is English the hottest new programming language or assembly language? This week on Training Data, Filip Kozera shares how Wordware (YC S24) is building tools for "word artisans" - people who can communicate their creative vision to AI systems. What Excel did for numbers, Wordware aims to do for AI. Listen here: YouTube: https://seq.vc/8hw Apple: https://seq.vc/mjq Spotify: https://seq.vc/odr

"Are you trying to replace and eliminate people, or amplify human creativity?" Josh Woodward, VP at Google Labs, cuts to the heart of what matters in AI development today. As AI capabilities accelerate, the values we encode in our technology will shape generations to come. This isn't just about technical capabilities—it's about intentional design choices that reflect our vision for the future. At Google Labs, they're focused on building AI that serves as a collaborative partner rather than a replacement. Their approach demonstrates how AI can enhance human potential rather than diminish it. The most successful AI implementations won't be those that simply automate existing processes, but those that reimagine workflows and amplify what makes us uniquely human. Hear more on Training Data: YouTube: https://seq.vc/w99 Apple: https://seq.vc/rdi Spotify: https://seq.vc/84t

?? Excited to share my TEDAI San Francisco talk! How we advance AI into an era of superintelligence, with true *practical* impact in our world. ? I ask: For all the groundbreaking milestones we’ve reached, all the intelligence benchmarks we’ve shattered, for the $53B invested in generative AI companies 2023-2024 combined, why *hasn’t* AI transformed our day to day lives in more meaningful ways? I dream about a world where AI is capable of taking on human workloads, even superhuman workloads, that produce economically valuable work. I’d like to see AI not just as an intelligent companion, but instead, autonomous agents that do our work better and faster, and advance the frontier of any field. At Sequoia Capital we've partnered with founders to build the future I dream of: ? A world of fully autonomous coding agents at the level of a 10x engineer, as Github CEO Thomas Dohmke envisions. (We're building this ReflectionAI, founded by AlphaGo and Gemini creators Misha Laskin and Ioannis Alexandros Antonoglou!) ? AI pentesters from XBOW built by OG Github Copilot creator Oege de Moor ? A revolution in AI drug design and development from Xaira Therapeutics led by Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Nobel Prize winner David Baker ? A world with embodied intelligence in our physical world, with breakthroughs led by Skild AI, founded by Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta Gradually... then suddenly. What a time to be alive! This is the arrival of *accessible supply of superhuman capability*, and it will redefine the frontier of human progress. We’re at the dawn of a new era… So to all the builders out there, this is *your* time to build this era of superintelligence with real *practical* impact. ? And ask yourself: what is the scale of your ambition? I can’t wait to build this future with you! https://lnkd.in/gVcGT7ya

Today, we’re publishing a guide on building an authorized RAG chatbot. WTH is that? If you’re adding an LLM-powered chatbot to your app, you don’t want it serving up just any data—it needs to respect permissions, just like the rest of your app. How do you do this? Here’s a technical guide on how to solve this problem with Oso, Supabase, and OpenAI. Read the post for more info: https://lnkd.in/gWZvujbP

Don't sleep on Google / Google DeepMind in AI... This week on Training Data, Google Labs VP Josh Woodward gave us the BTS on Google's imagination playground for AI, from Notebook to Mariner (computer use agent) to Veo (video models). Thanks Josh for the spicy convo and hot takes :) Ravi Gupta Sequoia Capital YouTube: https://seq.vc/w99 Apple: https://seq.vc/rdi Spotify: https://seq.vc/84t

When Assaf Rappaport and I first met in 2013, he thought I was Don Valentine. That might be why he took the meeting. After realizing I wasn’t Don, he still gave me a shot which led to Sequoia Capital leading the earliest rounds in Assaf’s first company, Adallom, and then his second company, Wiz. Assaf, Yinon C., Roy Reznik, and Ami Luttwak have always been special. With Adallom, they proved to be ambitious founders who could execute at scale. After selling the company to Microsoft and working there for years, they were ready to start something new and hungry to build it bigger than last time. This gave Sequoia and Gili Raanan the conviction to co-lead Wiz’s first investment round when there was no clear idea or product yet. Shortly after we partnered with Wiz, the team hit on the insight that cloud security needed a simpler, agentless architecture for an increasingly complex digital world. Once the vision for Wiz became clear, there was no stopping them. The team strategically leveraged their Israeli time zone, working 9-5 on the product and then working late into the night on sales calls to the U.S. and Europe. Wiz reached $100 million in ARR in just 18 months, faster than any software company in history. Today Google announced its intent to acquire Wiz. This milestone marks the start of an exciting new chapter. Wiz and Google Cloud share a vision to improve security by making it easier and faster for organizations of all types and sizes to protect themselves, end-to-end, across all major clouds. This will help spur the adoption of multicloud cybersecurity. We couldn’t be prouder of Assaf, Yinon, Roy, Ami, and the entire Wiz team. It’s been an honor to be your partner for over a decade. Thank you for letting us be a part of your journey. https://lnkd.in/gWSNCSsK