Sequoia Capital

Excited to share our launch of Kela Defense from stealth today, including a great profile in the The Wall Street Journal. As my first Sequoia investment, this company has been a huge focus for me over the last year. We’re excited to finally share what we’ve been working on. Kela is building a modern defense prime based in Israel, with a vision of defending not just Israel, but the entire Western Alliance. The thesis is simple: Israel is one of the only Western countries with a draft. Its cadre of “technowarriors” have built some of the most elite startups in the world. As conflict becomes ever-more tech native, could we redeploy these technowarriors back into the defense sector? We believe that Kela’s software platform and operational agility will enable Israel and its allies to better adapt in today’s fast-evolving defense landscape. It’s been an absolute pleasure to partner with Alon Dror, Hamutal Meridor, Jason Manne, and Omer Bar-Ilan. Alon is an elite Talpiot graduate, one of the top units in Israel. Hamutal previously ran Palantir’s Israel business. The Kela team that we’ve recruited over the last year is world class and growing. We're proud to announce $39m in funding from Sequoia and Lux. https://lnkd.in/gm-Stdtu

Advice on building AI agents, from OpenAI Deep Research team member Josh Tobin.

How is Harvey disrupting the $1T legal industry? Co-founder Winston Weinberg joined us on Training Data to reveal their approach to transforming legal workflows and business models. ⚙️ Build for complexity, not commodity: The most defensible AI systems tackle what next-gen models can’t. Success comes from deep domain expertise and specialized workflows that combine multiple AI capabilities. 🚀 Speed is the new competitive edge: Winston says we’re living through the most compressed period of change in history. Constant testing and rapid integration of new developments isn’t optional—the biggest risk is moving too slowly. 📋 Process expertise trumps data alone: You can’t just train models on public legal data. The secret sauce? Domain experts who can map complex workflows step-by-step, then train AI to execute with precision. 🔗 Start narrow, scale smart: Build high-accuracy vertical solutions for specific use cases first, then chain them together into unified workflows. This maintains quality while making powerful tools accessible to everyone. 🤝 Partner to transform, not disrupt: Harvey isn’t trying to replace law firms—they’re helping them evolve. By turning loss-leader services into profitable software offerings, firms can expand market share while maintaining quality standards. 🔊 Listen to the full episode: 👇 YouTube: https://seq.vc/rjw Apple: https://seq.vc/a34 Spotify: https://seq.vc/1dy

Mirage is LIVE Generate energetic, high-converting ads with people that don’t exist — complete with animated body language and micro-expressions — using Mirage, the first foundation model built to generate UGC-style content. Get started with a script or an audio file, then specify the look of your spokesperson, their background, outfit, objects, and even emotion. It’s never been easier to iterate and scale ad production with Mirage, now available in Captions Ad Studio.

When Winston Weinberg started Harvey in 2022, many were dismissing AI application companies as "GPT wrappers." But he saw what others missed: legal expertise can't simply be scraped from the internet. This insight led to Harvey's unique approach: combining experienced lawyers' domain knowledge with AI innovation. Rather than just applying models to legal text, they broke down intricate processes into steps, building specialized workflows that augment rather than replace human expertise. Harvey's success proves that the real opportunity in AI isn't just better models—it's understanding the industry expertise that can't be learned from a dataset.

I met Mateus at a Stanford University Graduate School of Business dinner almost two years ago. I could tell immediately that he was special. Mateus was the youngest person to ever attend law school in Brazil, at age 14. He argued and won a case before Brazil's Supreme Court, earned a Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree from Harvard Law School and passed the New York bar exam – all while still under the legal drinking age of 21. So when Mateus dropped out of business school to pursue a company idea, I listened. Mateus identified a big drain on the Brazilian economy: a legal structure that incentivizes consumers to sue companies by demanding zero recourse even if the consumer loses. This bizarre legal structure has resulted in approximately 80 million active lawsuits in Brazil alone, more than in the US, making it one of the most litigious countries in the world. Mateus concluded this was a drag on the economy. International businesses would leave the market because of this burden. He was determined to relieve the pressure by using AI to prepare cases automatically. What used to take hours without AI now takes minutes, costs less, and is more effective for companies. When we asked the GC of a major international corporation what she would do if Enter (formerly Talisman) disappeared tomorrow, she shook her head and responded “I am done. I am done. I would die.” Mateus joined forces with the brilliant and dynamic Henrique Vaz and Michael Mac-Vicar to tackle this problem. Both are outliers. Henrique was CMO of a 9-figure marketing budget by age 28 and Mike is a repeat co-founder and CTO, building his last business to 9-figures of revenue and a 10-figure valuation. It's rare you find a team solving a big problem that's important to a nation, with excellent founder-market fit, extremely fast revenue growth, and with ever expanding market potential (they are now focused on implementing enterprise agents throughout the Brazilian economy). It's even rarer that such a team is brilliant, kind, funny and a delight to work with. Thank you and congratulations on this milestone to the Enter team!

We are beyond excited to come out of stealth mode and share our partnership with Sequoia Capital! Enter was founded in 2023 with the mission of making Brazil a global leader in Artificial Intelligence. We combine human expertise with AI efficiency to help major Latin American companies optimize critical processes that are high-volume and labor-intensive. We began our journey by applying AI to create personalized lawsuit answers at scale, enabling enterprises to increase their win rates in court and become more efficient. Our clients include Nubank, Banco Bmg, iFood, SulAmérica, Light, Inter, C6 Bank, Vivo (Telefônica Brasil), Agibank, banco BV, V.tal, among others. Enter is Sequoia Capital’s second-ever investment in Brazil, the world’s leading venture capital firm. Sequoia has invested in two-thirds of NASDAQ, achieving legendary returns with companies like Apple, NVIDIA, Google, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube and more. Since its investment in Nubank — one of its most successful bets ever —, the firm had distanced itself from Brazil but has now returned to invest in artificial intelligence. With this investment, Enter becomes the first Brazilian company to join Sequoia’s AI portfolio, alongside OpenAI, xAI, Harvey, and Sierra. If you want to read more about the investment, please check out the link in the comments!

at Sequoia Capital we are now looking for… recruiters! multiple of our Series A portfolio companies are hiring first recruiters. these are crucial founding roles with A+ teams obsessed with recruiting. what we’re looking for ➡ full cycle technical recruiter ➡ exceptional sourcing abilities ➡ hunger, adaptability, scrappiness ➡ bonus: experience in early-stage companies ➡ location: bay area it’s the chance to ‼️ build a team from ~10 to ~100, ~1,000 and ~10,000 ‼️ bend the arc of what we think are some of the most promising companies ‼️ work with founders who live and breathe recruiting ‼️ work at the forefront of generative AI, with material upside if this sounds like you or someone you know, please email me!

🚨New investment! Excited to share Sequoia Capital's partnership w/ Misha Laskin & Ioannis Alexandros Antonoglou, *the* pioneers behind AlphaGo & Gemini, on a new mission to build ReflectionAI: 🚀Build superintelligent agents to conduct all knowledge work, starting with autonomous coding agents. Reflection has built a world-class team who pioneered some of AI’s greatest breakthroughs: ✅Deep Q Networks, AlphaGo, AlphaZero and MuZero—landmark achievements in RL ✅PaLM, Character AI, ChatGPT and Gemini—cutting-edge advances in LLMs But what makes Reflection truly unique isn’t just its elite technical expertise—it’s the tight integration of research and product, combined with a customer-first approach to AI development. ❤️Legendary companies are built on solving the most ambitious problems of our lifetime. As CEO Misha puts it: “We’re working on the root node problem of our lifetime.” We have deep conviction in their potential and are honored to have been their first and long-term partner. On a personal note—working with Misha and Ioannis has been one of the greatest adventures of our lives. We’re hiring world-class researchers, engineers and product builders in San Francisco, New York and London. Come build the future with us! Read our story on why we invested: https://lnkd.in/gigM-FKu

Today we are announcing Reflection. Our team pioneered major advances in RL and LLMs, including AlphaGo and Gemini. At Reflection, we're building superintelligent autonomous systems. We believe that solving autonomous coding will enable superintelligence more broadly. Our company is defined by three things: 1) A team behind some of the most capable RL and LLM systems ever created - the two building blocks for superintelligence. 2) A focus on building the best autonomous coding systems in the world. Rather than doing many things, we do one thing really well. 3) Equal emphasis on research and product. Superintelligence cannot be built in a vacuum. We look for colleagues who have high internal drive, integrity, and a deep interest in the problems we’re pursuing. If that’s exciting to you, join us. We’re excited to partner with Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, and CRV and want to thank Shirin Ghaffary for covering the story. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/e4Szy9bR