Alignment
Digging a little deeper, and it’s clear that Sequoia’s involvement isn’t quite as altruistic as it might seem, owing to the fact that its two new fellows intersect with startups in its existing investment portfolio. By way of example, vLLM is used by Replicate, which Sequoia (and Andreessen Horowitz) backed across its Series A and Series B rounds.
Elsewhere, Sequoia last year co-led a $5 million seed round into an AI startup called Factory, with the startup’s founder and CTO Eno Reyes confirming that his company uses Chatbot Arena to “keep close track” of the top LLM options.