Sequoia Capital closes London office and ends Arc and Scouts programs

Sequoia Reverses Two Decades of Global Expansion

Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital has posted a memo to X titled “The Sequoia of Tomorrow,” announcing that it has raised roughly $10 billion in new funds while dismantling major pieces of its global operations built over the last 20 years.

The Bottom Line:

• Sequoia raised roughly $10 billion in new funds while simultaneously closing its London office, shutting down its Arc accelerator, and ending its Scouts program.

• The firm has merged its early-stage and growth teams into a single unit, flattened its partnership structure, and eliminated the Monday partner meeting.

The Anatomy of the VC Rewind

Sequoia describes coming out of a roughly 20-year expansionary phase under a succession of stewards running from Doug Leone to Jim Goetz to Roelof Botha. That era of scaling built multiple businesses across multiple geographies, which the firm now argues created an unintended side effect: internal hierarchy.

Nearly everything being undone was built during that stretch. Among the casualties are two programs that connected Sequoia to early-stage founders. The Scouts program, launched around 2009, distributed small checks to operators and founders to invest on the firm’s behalf. That pipeline famously sourced early stakes in companies like Uber, brought in via Jason Calacanis, and Stripe, introduced by Sam Altman. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and Dropbox founders Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston also served as early scouts.

Alongside Scouts, Sequoia is shuttering Arc. Launched in March 2022, Arc operated as a batch accelerator for pre-seed and seed founders. It ran several cohorts a year for seven weeks, providing admitted companies with $500,000 to $1 million upfront. Both programs represented a thesis of being early and being everywhere. The new directive explicitly rejects that breadth in favor of putting more energy behind fewer people and things.

Closing the London Office and Restructuring Leadership

Geographic footprint is also shrinking. Sequoia is closing its London office, which it opened in 2020, resulting in multiple departures. “We simply don’t see the need for a local presence,” the memo states, adding that while Europe will continue to produce outlier founders, the firm can support them from the Bay Area. Luciana Lixandru, hired from Accel in 2020 as Sequoia’s first partner in Europe, declined an offer to move to San Francisco. She remains a partner, retaining her board seats and continuing to invest personally in European founders.

The closure follows Andreessen Horowitz shuttering its London office last year and Coatue closing its own in 2024. For European entrepreneurs, the message reinforces that the center of gravity is once again in the Bay Area.

Leadership shifts match the structural rollback. Carl Eschenbach, who returned as a full-time partner in March, is back in the fold alongside Doug Leone. The firm now operates with seven general partners: co-stewards Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, Andrew Reed, Shaun Maguire, Konstantine Buhler, Sonya Huang, and David Cahn, who joined in 2023. Other internal adjustments include Jess Lee transitioning from running the Arc program to serving as chief product officer, while Stephanie Zhan, who joined in 2015, left the firm last month to launch her own new venture.

Meanwhile, Roelof Botha completely cut ties with Sequoia this summer around the time he joined SpaceX’s board, following his vote out as senior steward last fall. These moves continue a pattern of structural iteration that also saw Sequoia separate from its China and India/Southeast Asia arms in 2023, splitting those operations into HongShan and Peak XV.

Operational rituals are vanishing as well. The firm has discarded the Monday partner meeting cycle on the theory that founders operate 24/7 and investors should match that cadence. The combined changes leave the market watching to see how a streamlined, domestic-focused Sequoia deploys its freshly raised $10 billion.