Sequoia Ends the Scout Program It Pioneered 17 Years Ago in a Broad Overhaul of the Firm

Sequoia Capital has shut down the Scouts program it pioneered about 17 years ago, ending one of the venture capital industry’s most copied ways of finding young startups. The move is part of a broad overhaul the firm announced in a memo posted to X on Wednesday, titled “The Sequoia of Tomorrow.”

The memo, signed by the firm’s seven general partners, said Sequoia had “sunset our batch accelerator (Arc) and Scouts programs” as part of a push to focus on “high-conviction, highly selective venture capital investing.” The firm also said it was closing its London office, merging its early-stage and growth teams into one, flattening its partnership and ending the Monday partner meeting. It said it had raised about $10 billion in new funds.

Scouts, which Sequoia started around 2009, gave small checks to founders and operators to invest on the firm’s behalf. The idea was to see deals through people closer to new founders than any partner could be. Over time, many other venture firms copied the model.

Doubts about the model

TechCrunch, reporting on the change this week, said a view is forming in the industry that the model has reached its limits in its current form. Venture capitalist Sheel Mohnot wrote on X that the program “never made sense” to him and said scouts have little at stake in the investments they pick and can still miss big deals. He added that he expects other firms to close their programs too.

Sequoia did not argue against scouts in its memo. It framed the decision as a matter of focus, saying that “putting more energy behind fewer people and things means better support for the founders we back.”

Other firms are changing course

Rival firm Andreessen Horowitz rolled out a global scout network, but partner Gabriel Vasquez told TechCrunch earlier this year that the firm had remade its program to concentrate on fewer people. “They get more budget, but we have reduced the number,” he said, adding that scouts are now expected to be more active, for example by co-hosting dinners with founders.

Roxanne Varza, who runs the Paris startup campus Station F and was a Sequoia scout from 2020 to 2025, wrote on LinkedIn that she was “sad” to hear the program was ending and hoped other funds would not follow suit. She told TechCrunch that becoming a scout had often been a step toward a full-time investing job, and that the programs had helped the investment culture in Europe grow more mature.

TechCrunch named two reasons the programs may have run their course: experienced operators can earn more as angel investors, keeping the returns on their own money, and the largest venture firms are now well known enough that the best founders usually come to them. Varza said scout-style deals are more likely to change shape than to vanish. “Scouts was just a way to scale the format,” she said.

Reporting based on coverage by TechCrunch.