Sequoia Capital

There is a lot of AI news. Let's keep it simple. We're in a multi-decade transformation that's akin to the Industrial Revolution. This is manufacturing for the mind. Costs go down. That's what manufacturing does. Cheaper cognitive works reduces drudgery and increases abundance. Consider textile manufacturing, which made clothing plentiful and ubiquitous. In a 30 minute interview with Kate Rooney at CNBC, we got into what this all means. Talking with her is so clear because she asks the right questions. One of the key shifts? Moving from AI assistants to AI agents. While assistants answer questions, agents take action. And when the cost of AI inference goes down toward zero, it will change the way we do business. At Sequoia Capital, we focus on what will be transformational in the long term. The real winners will emerge at the application layer. Some of the examples discussed in this clip are companies already making waves: 🤖 Dust Pioneering the future of AI assistant management - helping users customize and control multiple AI agents for specific tasks, from email drafting to report writing. A glimpse into how we'll work with AI in our daily lives. 🎯 XBOW - From the creators of GitHub Copilot comes a revolutionary approach to cybersecurity. Their AI agent already ranks #11 in the US for finding vulnerabilities - showing how AI agents can outperform human experts in specialized tasks. 📊 Kumo - High precision, inexpensive, at-scale predictive AI takes the tech that powers giants like Pinterest, Airbnb, and LinkedIn and makes it accessible to everyone. This kind of AI has already created hundreds-of-billions in revenue. 📧 Rox - Redefining AI-powered sales by keeping humans in the loop. When they removed auto-send and let top sellers manage AI agents, reply rates tripled. A perfect example of human-AI collaboration done right. 📈 Citadel Securities - A pioneer in AI-powered market making for 30+ years. Their network of AI "alphas" shows how automated agents can create smoother, more liquid markets - a preview of how AI networks will transform industries. ⚡ ServiceNow - Leading by example in enterprise AI adoption - 85% of their workforce uses AI daily, saving 3 million hours. Shows how large companies can successfully integrate AI across operations. 🏥 Viz.ai - First FDA-approved AI medical device, now in 40%+ of US hospitals, identifying critical strokes faster than humans. Proving how AI can literally save lives by being always-on and ultra-precise. 🏨 Commure - Tackling healthcare's massive administrative burden with AI. With 15-50% of healthcare work being administrative, they're using AI to handle back-office tasks so doctors can focus more on patients. Full details from the 30min conversation can be found here: https://lnkd.in/gzFqXdd3

What made AlphaGo legendary? As Google DeepMind founding engineer and ReflectionAI AI co-founder Ioannis Antonoglou explains, AlphaGo was remarkable not just for beating Lee Sedol, but for its reliable performance - winning 60 consecutive online matches without a single loss. On a new episode of Sequoia Capital's Training Data, Ioannis Antonoglou delves into the importance of reinforcement learning to make LLM-based agents as robust as the ones created with AlphaGo, MuZero, and AlphaZero.

A fan of mental models, Alfred Lin breaks down how to work backwards and forwards with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project podcast. Listen to the full conversation for strategies around navigating startup challenges, building resilient teams, and creating long-lasting value. 🔗👇 https://lnkd.in/gzbqccrQ

[EN] This one is for those who love to learn more about Nu's behind-the-scenes! I joined Douglas Leone, David Vélez, and Edward Wible in the latest Sequoia Capital's Crucible Moments podcast to share the story of the inception of Nubank, from our initial vision to the many challenges and triumphs we've experienced along the way. At that point, I was 30 and had a successful, but still recent career. When I met David, he told me how he was thinking about the financial system and how technology, design, and data could change how we do things—and that just sounded like music to my ears. I invite you to listen to this episode and learn more about our journey and how it is a result of the importance of focus, resilience, and always putting the customer first. [PT] Este é para aquelas pessoas que adoram saber mais sobre os bastidores do Nubank! Participei do mais recente episódio do podcast Crucible Moments, da Sequoia Capital, ao lado de Douglas Leone, David Vélez e Edward Wible para compartilhar a história do início do Nubank, desde nossa visão inicial até os muitos desafios e vitórias que vivenciamos ao longo do caminho. Naquela época, eu tinha 30 anos e uma carreira bem-sucedida, mas ainda recente. Quando conheci o David, ele me contou que estava pensando sobre o sistema financeiro e como tecnologia, design e dados poderiam mudar a maneira como fazemos as coisas – e isso soou como música para os meus ouvidos. Convido todos vocês a ouvir este episódio e aprender mais sobre nossa jornada e como ela é resultado da importância do foco, da resiliência e de sempre colocar o cliente em primeiro lugar. https://lnkd.in/dv5K8vGx

In 2013, David Vélez told Sequoia Capital about his vision to challenge the entrenched banks in Brazil, which controlled the market and charged among the highest fees in the world. He wasn't Brazilian, had no banking experience, and wasn’t a technologist. As a first-time founder, he was taking on Goliath, but he had conviction that customers in Latin America deserved a better experience. It’s been remarkable to see the Nubank team overcome every obstacle to become the most valuable financial services company in Latin America, with over 100 million loyal customers in three countries and counting. And their journey is just beginning. Every founder—and all the outsiders being told they don’t stand a chance—can learn something from Nubank’s story.

Here's the first-ever Nubank credit card swipe, by David Vélez and the small team near their Sao Paulo office. They were taking on Brazil’s bank giants which charged some of the world’s highest fees, convinced a customer-centric digital bank could change everything. Defying attempts to crush them, today Nubank is the most valuable financial services company in Latin America with over 100M loyal customers across 3 countries and counting. Lesson: Customer love is the ultimate moat.

The U.S. electric grid is worth something like $1.5 trillion, has nearly 600,000 people working to keep it running, and powers practically everything. And when there’s an issue, problems range from inconvenience to forest fires and lost lives. How do we protect and defend the grid? Gridware’s Timothy Barat, who started working in electric infrastructure at 15, has been thinking about this question for more than decade. With his cofounders Hall Chen and A Bin Omar, he’s building the instrumentation layer for the grid, and is now working with some of the country’s largest utilities. Bryan Schreier, the entire Sequoia Capital team and I are delighted to lead their Series A!

We've all heard the standard AI narrative: automation, efficiency, disruption. But something more fundamental is happening beneath the surface. AI isn't just changing what we do—it's may change how we think. In a recent episode of Sequoia Capital's Training Data podcast, Dust co-founder Gabriel Hubert introduced a concept that may define the next era of knowledge work: the "stochastic mindset." He calls it "the biggest shift in the use of the tools we have since the advent of the computer." But what exactly does this mean for the future of work? The stochastic mindset moves us from having minimal leverage on a task and nearly 100% certainty of its outcome to frequently having 100%+ leverage on a task and far less certainty on the exact manifestation of its outcome. This transition is the difference between doing something yourself and delegating a task to someone else. The stochastic mindset isn't just about embracing probability—it's about adapting to a world with constant uncertainty. From founders mapping uncertain futures to knowledge workers navigating information overload, this new way of thinking could be the key to thriving in the AI age. Ready to turn uncertainty into your competitive advantage? Read more 👇 https://lnkd.in/gZ7vaJxu

AI is decades in the making. The biggest and most impactful type of AI so far remains predictive AI. It powers everything from the TikTok feed (still there??) to this post on LinkedIn. It drives trillions of market cap. If your company isn't using predictive AI - it is a decade or more behind. With Kumo, co-founders Hema Raghavan, Vanja Josifovski, and Jure Leskovec are changing how companies harness AI by automatically transforming relational data (eg Snowflake / Databricks) into powerful predictions. The tean built many of the AI features on LinkedIn, Pinterest and Airbnb and is now bringing that innovation to the world. On a new episode of Training Data, Sonya and I spoke to Hema about the exciting possibilities of combining the power of language models with the graph structure of your data, how running GNNs on GPUs has led to breakthroughs in performance, the query language Kumo developed to help companies predict future data points, and more.

We’re excited to launch the 7th annual #ForbesAI50 Sequoia Capital is proud to partner with Forbes to recognize the most promising privately-held AI companies. From OpenAI and Scale AI to Harvey and Pika, our alumni are reshaping the future. Apply now: https://lnkd.in/gHu67-DC