Sequoia doubles down on AI with $10B fund under new leadership
Tech Funding News Sofia Chesnokova
Sequoia's raising about $10B, its biggest fund in 54 years. New leaders Lin and Grady grew a $1B Anthropic bet into billions after its valuation nearly tripled in months.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Sofia Chesnokova — read the original for the full story.
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Five months into running the show, Alfred Lin and Pat Grady are doing something Sequoia hasn't done in over half a century: committing roughly $10 billion in one go. Bloomberg reports this would be the largest raise in the firm's 54-year history, and it's the first major capital move made entirely under the new co-stewardship that took over after Roelof Botha stepped down in November 2025.
The story behind the number starts small. Lin originally floated putting $1 billion into Anthropic, a company Sequoia had previously skipped in favor of OpenAI and xAI. His partners argued for going bigger. Then, in a Silicon Valley conference room on a Monday in May, the firm settled on the roughly $10 billion figure instead. What changed their minds was watching Anthropic's valuation nearly triple in five months — from a January round that grew from a $10 billion target to over $20 billion at a $350 billion valuation, alongside Singapore's GIC and Coatue Management, to a $65 billion Series H in June that valued the company at $965 billion, with Sequoia joined by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, and Greenoaks.
This isn't Sequoia's first mega-fund this year, either. Back in April, the firm closed a $7 billion fund to back its US and Europe expansion, nearly double the $3.4 billion fund it closed in 2022. That was also Lin and Grady's first major fundraising effort together. By the end of last year, Sequoia was already managing more than $80 billion in assets, and now they're stacking another $10 billion commitment on top of it.
They're hardly alone in thinking bigger checks are the move. Founders Fund closed $6 billion. Khosla Ventures targeted $5.5 billion. Kleiner Perkins closed $3.5 billion split across two vehicles. Iconiq Capital, another Anthropic backer, is raising an eighth fund, and General Catalyst is reportedly chasing about $10 billion of its own. The pattern is clear: firms are funneling money into fewer, much larger bets rather than spreading it thin.
And Sequoia hasn't abandoned the small end of the business while all this happens. It launched a $950 million early-stage and seed fund back in October 2025, and just this month led a $1 billion round for nuclear startup Valar Atomics. Lin, who joined the firm in 2010 and backed Airbnb, DoorDash, and Kalshi, and Grady, who has run growth-stage investing since 2015 and co-led the OpenAI bet with Lin and Sonya Huang, are now willing to hold stakes in direct rivals like OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic at once — a break from the old VC habit of steering clear of a portfolio company's competitors, and a sign of how much the internal politics at Sequoia shifted once Botha's more cautious approach gave way to theirs.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Every firm suddenly chasing multi-billion-dollar single checks isn't a sign of conviction, it's a sign of panic dressed up as strategy. Sequoia spent years avoiding Anthropic on purpose, then reversed course the moment the valuation math got scary enough, which says more about fear of missing out than about any newfound insight into where AI actually goes next. Backing direct rivals with ten-figure sums isn't bold contrarian thinking, it's just spreading the same bet across every horse in the race and hoping one of them wins big enough to cover the rest.
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