Nearly two years ago venture capital’s biggest global brand Sequoia Capital split up with its China and India funds. Now, its former India and Southeast Asia arm, rebranded as Peak XV, is back home in Silicon Valley.
The $9 billion venture fund has hired partner Arnav Sahu to make investments as part of a new San Francisco-based team. Peak XV’s managing partner Shailendra Singh said that the fund needed a permanent presence in the United States to work with the best founders and help them scale globally.
Peak XV had been investing globally, but a recent migration of international founders moving to the Bay Area to build their startups has shifted its focus. “We are partnering with more and more companies that are born outside the U.S. but their target market is the U.S.,” he told Forbes.
The plan to expand to the Bay Area with an initial focus on seed stage and growth stage deals had been on Peak XV’s timeline since its split from Sequoia Capital but the explosion of investment in artificial intelligence has expedited its schedule, said Singh. “The minute we became independent, we were transparent with other leaders at Sequoia that it would be critical for us to start to build out a U.S. team,” he told Forbes in an interview.
Peak XV’s first partner hire in the United States will be Arnav Sahu. Sahu started his investing career at Spark Capital after working for networking giant Cisco, and earlier this year joined Peak XV from Y Combinator where he focused on growth investments in startups like ScaleAI, Vanta, and Rippling. “Arnav fit our bill perfectly because he had seen a lot of seed at Y Combinator and growth with YC Continuity,” Singh explained.
Peak XV has slowly been building a team in the United States since the split from its Sand Hill Road-based parent. It hired former Sequoia talent partner Jaime Bott in 2023; Operating partners Chris Merritt, and Dini Mehta joined over the last year.
Sequoia Capital and its former China and India funds split in June 2023. The decision to do so was largely driven by how best to manage diverging funds and competition between rival startups in each portfolio. Rising tensions between the United States and China also played a role.
Sequoia was one of a number of venture funds that drew attention from the Biden Administration over its backing for Chinese technology companies. A number of other global venture funds like DCM Ventures, Matrix Partners and GGV Capital also moved over the last two years to spin out China-focused teams.
Since the split, Hongshan Capital (formerly Sequoia China) has opened offices in London and Singapore, potentially putting it in competition with Sequoia’s Europe team, and Peak XV’s Southeast Asia unit based in the city-state. Peak XV itself has made a string of investments in U.S.-based companies like database startup Supabase, AI agent platform Atomicwork and marketing unicorn Hightouch.
Singh doesn’t anticipate any friction with his former partners in the U.S. “We don’t have any crazy bold plans for the U.S. where we will be investing billions,” he told Forbes. “The average successful company has 10 to 20 investors on the cap table and they can have Sequoia, or another top U.S. VC, and us as a complimentary strength.”
Peak XV’s new international focus comes amid an investment boom in its home market in India. Pitchbook reported that VC fundraising in India grew 77% last year defying a global slump. That surge follows a record number of initial public offerings on Mumbai’s National Stock Exchange in 2024.
The bull run on India’s public markets has led to 16 IPOs from Peak XV’s portfolio over the last five years, with around $1.2 billion in exits over the last 12 months alone. While the IPO window in the United States, and Europe seems to have been slammed shut by President Donald Trump’s trade war, Peak XV has at least three Indian unicorns including payments platform Pine Labs preparing to go public. “We have three big IPOs we are very excited about and another 15 or 20 companies preparing for IPOs,” said Singh.
Despite this several senior partners have left Peak XV since its split with Sequoia, and the fund has trimmed its fund size and fees in its last fund raising in 2024, according to TechCrunch.
