Stephanie Zhan

Stephanie Zhan grew up in Hong Kong and Beijing, graduated from the International School of Beijing in 2011, and then enrolled at Stanford University. She initially considered economics, then moved to management science and engineering, chose computer science in her sophomore year, and ultimately earned a bachelor’s degree in the field.⁠[1][2][3]

At Stanford, she took part in undergraduate research, worked as a teaching assistant, and was involved with the student entrepreneurship organization BASES. She also joined the Computer History Museum’s NextGen Advisory Board, extending her interest in computing beyond the classroom.⁠[2]

In the summer of 2013, Zhan was a product marketing intern at Google Maps, helping with tips content for the new version of Maps. In 2014, she completed a three-month internship at Nest, working on unreleased products and presenting her results to company leadership.⁠[2]

In July 2015, Zhan joined Sequoia Capital and moved into early-stage technology investing. She had previously worked on product at Nest. By early 2018, she had sourced six investments for the firm, including Graphcore, Quidd, and Against Gravity; Against Gravity later became known as Rec Room.⁠[4][5]

In 2018, she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Venture Capital category.⁠[4]

In the spring of 2016, Zhan learned from a friend that Nick Fajt was developing a virtual reality social space, and then arranged for the team to give a demo at Sequoia’s office. Her interest extended beyond virtual reality devices themselves to the possibility of people doing activities and socializing together in digital spaces. Sequoia subsequently became an early investor in Rec Room.⁠[5]

In a 2018 Sequoia interview, Zhan named “why now” as a key question in evaluating startup opportunities, looking at whether technological progress and social and cultural changes have made an idea feasible. She also emphasized keeping an open mind and acknowledged that investing requires learning how to allocate time and to turn down opportunities that are not a fit.⁠[1]

Zhan noticed Linear through user discussions on social media and reached out to the founding team, which was not yet planning to raise funding. She valued the product’s clear trade-offs in speed, simplicity, and developer experience. Sequoia led its 2019 seed round and its 2020 Series A.⁠[6]

In 2019, she also began working with Middesk, a business identity verification company. Founded in 2018 by Kyle Mack and Kurt Ruppel, the company provides business clients with verification of information on business entities, industries, and compliance.⁠[7]

In late 2021, Zhan met TavusTavusTavus is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company founded by Hassaan Raza and Quinn Favret; it develops digital humans that hold real-time face-to-face video conversations, along with related multimodal models, and calls itself a “human computing” company.Open the full entry founders Hassaan Raza and Quinn Favret and tried an early version of the product that evening. Sequoia subsequently led the seed round. Tavus initially generated personalized video content by learning from video footage provided by users, for uses such as sales outreach.⁠[8]

Her early AI investments also include Replicate. The 2024 Midas Brink list from ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry named Replicate and Tavus as early-stage companies she backed.⁠[9]

In 2023, Zhan began working with Skild. Founders Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta aimed to build a foundation model that can work across different robot hardware; within days of first meeting the team, Zhan arranged a partner discussion and took part in its early funding.⁠[10][11]

On July 9, 2024, Skild announced a $300 million funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation, and Zhan joined its board. These are the company’s total round and valuation figures; the related announcements do not attribute the entire amount to her or to Sequoia.⁠[11]

In June 2023, Sequoia announced its partnership with Mach, founded by Ethan Thornton. Zhan was among the first team members to meet Thornton; the firm led its seed round, viewing it as an investment in a new generation of defense hardware. She co-wrote the article introducing the partnership with Shaun MaguireShaun MaguireShaun Maguire is a venture capitalist and a partner on Sequoia Capital’s seed/early team; he earned a PhD at Caltech and previously co-founded the cybersecurity company Qadium (later renamed Expanse) and served as a partner at GV.Open the full entry.⁠[12]

On June 4, 2024, Forbes and TrueBridge published the Midas Brink list, which included Zhan. Her profile mentioned her seed-stage investments in Linear, Middesk, and Rec Room, as well as her work on Sequoia’s seed investing strategy. The list focuses on rising figures in venture capital.⁠[9]

In July 2024, Graphcore announced that it had been acquired by SoftBank GroupSoftBank GroupSoftBank Group (SoftBank Group Corp.) is an investment holding company headquartered in Tokyo, founded by Masayoshi Son in 1981. Starting out as a distributor of personal computer software, it moved into the internet, broadband and mobile communications, and has since become an investment group centered on AI-related assets such as Arm, the SoftBank Vision Funds and OpenAI.Open the full entry, becoming a wholly owned subsidiary while retaining the Graphcore brand and its Bristol headquarters. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Graphcore was one of the projects Zhan sourced early after joining Sequoia.⁠[13][4]

In October 2024, Zhan gave a talk at TEDAI in San Francisco on AI moving from assistive tools toward more autonomous systems and how such changes might enter daily life. The future scenarios in the talk are her outlook on technological development.⁠[14]

On March 7, 2025, Zhan and Charlie Curnin wrote an article introducing Sequoia’s backing of Reflection. Founded by Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, the company aims to start with autonomous coding to build AI systems that can carry out and verify work on real tasks.⁠[15]

In the article, she described coding as a domain with both clear feedback and broad application demand, and discussed a research path from reinforcement learning experience on specialized tasks toward more general systems. These are the team’s research goals and investment judgments and do not mean that general superintelligence had been achieved at the time.⁠[15]

On June 10, 2025, Linear announced an $82 million Series C round at a $1.25 billion valuation. The round included new primary equity and secondary transactions, was led by AccelAccelAccel is a venture capital firm co-founded in 1983 by Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz. It invests through regional teams and early-stage, growth and late-stage funds, with operations in the United States, Europe, Israel and India. Its investment history includes Facebook, Flipkart, Atlassian, Slack and other technology businesses. Fundraising totals, regulatory assets under management and portfolio-company transaction values are distinct measures.Open the full entry, and had continued participation from Sequoia and 01A. Founder Karri Saarinen also stated that the company remained profitable and that more than 15,000 companies used its product.⁠[16]

On December 1, 2025, Replicate co-founders Andreas Jansson and Ben Firshman announced that the company had officially become part of Cloudflare. They planned to combine its model-running tools with CloudflareCloudflareCloudflare (Cloudflare, Inc.) is a network infrastructure and security company headquartered in San Francisco that describes itself as a connectivity cloud company. Founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn and Lee Holloway, it uses its global network to provide content delivery, security and developer platform services for websites and applications, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2019 under the symbol NET.Open the full entry’s network and developer infrastructure to support more complete AI applications.⁠[17]

On December 2, 2025, Zhan wrote an article announcing Sequoia’s partnership with Ricursive Intelligence and its lead of the company’s founding round. Founded by Anna GoldieAnna GoldieAnna Goldie is an AI researcher and co-founder and CEO of Ricursive Intelligence. She previously worked at Anthropic and Google DeepMind and co-led AlphaChip.Open the full entry and Azalia MirhoseiniAzalia MirhoseiniAzalia Mirhoseini is an AI researcher, co-founder of Ricursive Intelligence, and assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University.Open the full entry, the company researches AI-assisted chip design, aiming to shorten hardware design and iteration cycles.⁠[18]

She linked compute constraints with AI research, arguing that improved chip design could drive the next stage of model development. The article mentions the founders’ prior experience with research such as AlphaChip, but the company’s future goals remain research and engineering tasks.⁠[18]

Rec Room shut down on June 1, 2026. Although the platform had raised substantial funding and built a user base, it was never able to reach sustainable profitability, with costs exceeding revenue. Before the shutdown, Snap took on some assets and team members rather than continuing to operate the entire Rec Room platform.⁠[19]

Zhan is currently an early-stage investing partner at Sequoia Capital, and her biography on the firm’s website lists board work at companies including Linear, Reflection, Ricursive Intelligence, and Skild. Her personal website is https://stephaniezhan.com/ (opens in a new window), and her public X account is https://x.com/stephzhan (opens in a new window).⁠[10][3]