Sequoia closes London office, kills Scouts and Arc programs

Sequoia Capital told the world on Wednesday that it has raised roughly $10 billion in new funds, even as it dismantles several of the programs and structures built during what the firm calls a roughly 20-year expansion. In a memo titled “The Sequoia of Tomorrow,” posted to X, the firm laid out a wave of changes at once: the London office is being shut, the Arc accelerator and Scouts program are both being retired, the early-stage and growth investing teams are being combined into a single unit, the partnership itself is being made flatter, and the weekly Monday partner meeting is being scrapped.

Scouts, launched around 2009, gave small checks to founders and operators to invest on Sequoia’s behalf — anecdotally, half the industry has since copied the model in some form — and is credited with surfacing deals including Uber and Stripe. Arc, a batch accelerator for pre-seed and seed founders modeled on Y Combinator, launched in March 2022 and gave admitted companies $500,000 to $1 million up front. Sequoia framed killing both programs as a choice to put more resources behind fewer priorities.

The London office, opened in 2020, will close, and several people will leave as a result; Sequoia said it does not see a need for a local presence in Europe and that it can keep supporting European founders from the Bay Area instead. Luciana Lixandru, who joined Sequoia from Accel in 2020 to become its first European partner, turned down an offer to relocate to San Francisco. “Europe is where my family is, and where I want to build,” she wrote on X, adding that she remains a partner and will keep investing personally in European founders. The move follows Andreessen Horowitz closing its own London office last year and Coatue shutting its London presence in 2024.

Sequoia now says seven general partners primarily run the firm: co-stewards Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, together with five other partners — Andrew Reed and Shaun Maguire among the longer-tenured names, Konstantine Buhler and Sonya Huang, and David Cahn, who joined in 2023. Former Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach returned as a full-time partner in March, Jess Lee, the firm’s first female partner, moved from the investor list to the role of chief product officer, and longtime investor Stephanie Zhan left last month to start her own firm. Roelof Botha, who was voted out as senior steward last fall, has since cut ties with Sequoia entirely and joined SpaceX’s board.

Why it matters

The retreat continues a pattern that began with Sequoia’s 2023 split from its China and India/Southeast Asia arms — trading geographic and programmatic reach for a smaller, Bay Area-centered model — and the next test is whether that bet still lets the firm back the outlier founders it says it wants, in Europe or anywhere else outside Silicon Valley.