Sequoia Capital
Consultancy : Company : Venture Capital
We strive to be the first true believers in the founders of tomorrow’s legendary companies—to have conviction in them when the rest of the world does not yet understand their vision. We’ve always partnered from the earliest stages and were seed investors in category-defining companies like YouTube, Airbnb and Stripe. In just 2019 and 2020, we made more seed investments than Series A investments and partnered with 40+ seed companies, most of which are still in stealth. The outlier founders we partner with recognize that a seed partnership with Sequoia unlocks a powerful Signaling Advantage and increases both the chances and magnitude of a seed-stage company’s chances for success.
Assembly Line
Sequoia makes first defense tech investment in Mach Industries
Defense startup Mach Industries has raised $5.7 million in a seed round led by Sequoia Capital, the first-ever defense tech investment in the venture capital giant’s history, the two companies said. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Mach said the funding will be used for product development, hiring talent, and expanding facilities.
Founded by MIT dropout and Thiel Fellow Ethan Thornton in 2022, Mach Industries focuses on building a hardware solution using field-sourced hydrogen creation and combustion techniques. It is working to develop a weapon system that uses the chemical reaction of oxygen and hydrogen to create a powerful explosion that could fuel unmanned aerial vehicles and aerial protection devices.
Squint Raises $6M in Funding from Sequoia Capital and Menlo Ventures to Expand AR-Powered Technology Platform
Squint, the technology platform that uses augmented reality (AR) to optimize factory procedures and empower operators, today announced $6 million in combined seed and pre-seed funding from Arc, Sequoia Capital’s pre-seed and seed-stage catalyst, and Menlo Ventures’ venture studio Menlo Labs, along with several angel investors.
Squint uses AR to power an intuitive mobile platform for factory operators who need dynamic, contextual help mapped to the world around them. The Squint platform brings the shop floor binder – full of instructions – to life, providing operators with an interactive experience that is both engaging and effective, while increasing learning speed and knowledge retention. With these capabilities, Squint enables organizations to digitize standard operating procedures using just a mobile phone, with no hassle — not even an IT team – making everyday tasks like training, operation, and maintenance faster and safer.
Squint’s roster of customers, including global brands like Siemens and The Volvo Group, speaks to the value of their solution. Early customers report an 86% decrease in training time for new operators. Rachel Wood, the Learning & Development Site Lead at Siemens Spartanburg, explains, “We see Squint completely transforming our training process on the factory floor. It enables our workforce to learn with immersive spatial guides that boost productivity and, most importantly, encourage safety.”
JITX Launches General Availability And Announces $12M Series A From Sequoia Capital
Today we’re announcing the general availability of JITX and that we raised a $12M Series A round, led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Funders Club and Liquid 2.
Hardware engineers need a credible way out of the trap they find themselves in. JITX helps by letting them write code that automates their engineering process. To get ahead they can’t just do one design after another – they need reusable code that designs hardware for them. To illustrate this point: a software engineer can upload code to GitHub and thousands of people can reuse that code in their own projects. Using a traditional hardware design flow, each one of those thousands of engineers would have to re-design and re-analyze the same circuit to make sure the design will behave correctly in their product. JITX brings the productivity of software to hardware.
At the same time we were working with enterprise design teams like Northrop Grumman. It turns out that they also needed JITX to address some specific problems. Like everyone else, their biggest challenge is finding and retaining skilled engineers. There just aren’t enough experts to go around, and even entry level positions are getting harder to fill (turns out new EE graduates are more interested in AI than drafting circuit boards). So they use JITX as a way to make their existing experts more productive. They find a lot of value out of checking designs automatically – a manual derating analysis on a complex FPGA board can take months but JITX automates the whole procedure. They are also excited about using code as a more efficient way to coordinate across different teams in the organization. At the end of our iteration process we were quickly designing boards that were at the limit of what traditional factories could build (our thanks to Gerry Partida for an 8/4 stacked microvia with sub 70um trace and space!). For example we built this silicon validation board that included 2500 pins in a complex 300um grid.