Carl Eschenbach

Partner, Sequoia Capital

📍 San Francisco Bay Area, United States🔄 Updated October 2026💼 16 investments📅 12 years investing🗓 Last invested Mar 2022
VC🌍 United States
16
Total investments
2
Early stage
6
Mid stage
4
Late stage
12y
Years active

Portfolio

13 investments · sorted by recency
All investments
Early stage
Mid stage
Late stage
Board Observer
Mar 2022
Democratizing AI on the Modern Data Stack The team behind PyG (PyG.org) is working on a turn-key solution for AI over large scale data warehouses. We believe the future of ML is a seamless integration between modern cloud data warehouses and AI algorithms. Our ML infrastructure massively simplifies the training and deployment of ML models on complex data. With over 40,000 monthly downloads and nearly 13,000 Github stars, PyG is the ultimate platform for training and development of Graph Neural Network (GNN) architectures. GNNs -- one of the hottest areas of machine learning now -- are a class of deep learning models that generalize Transformer and CNN architectures and enable us to apply the power of deep learning to complex data. GNNs are unique in a sense that they can be applied to data of different shapes and modalities.
Board Member
Jun 2021
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Clouds actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions, while getting the visibility they need to run AI systems reliably and at scale. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,400+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital.
Board Member
Mar 2021
Cresta is the AI operating system for customer experience, where human and AI agents work together to power the entire customer lifecycle. Cresta automates conversations and back-office processes, augments human work, and puts insight into action, so each conversation makes the next one better. Companies like United Airlines, CVS Health, and Marriott use Cresta to turn every interaction into a competitive advantage. Learn more at Cresta.com.
Board Member
Dec 2020
Salt Security protects the APIs that form the core of every modern application. Its patented API Protection Platform is the only API security solution that combines the power of cloud-scale big data and time-tested ML/AI to detect and prevent API attacks. By correlating activities across millions of APIs and users over time, Salt delivers deep context and actionable intelligence with real-time analysis and continuous insights for API discovery, attack prevention, and shift-left practices. Deployed quickly and seamlessly integrated within existing systems, the Salt Security platform gives customers immediate value and protection, so they can innovate with confidence and accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. By delivering context-based insights across the entire API lifecycle, Salt enables users to detect the reconnaissance activity of bad actors and block them before they can reach their objective. Through its unique API Context Engine (ACE) architecture, the Salt platform provides design analysis in pre-production, discovers all APIs, pinpoints and stops API attackers, and provides remediation insights. With a total funding of $271 million, Salt Security has a valuation of $1.4 billion. Its latest $140 Series D round, led by CapitalG, Alphabets independent growth fund, included participation from all existing investors, including Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, Tenaya Capital, S Capital VC, Advent International, Alkeon Capital, and DFJ Growth. Salt Security holds the only granted patent for using AI to identify and prevent API attacks and is the only solution that automatically and continuously discovers all APIs. This approach enables a complete and up-to-date inventory of all APIs. The Salt API security platform leads the market with the simplest, most comprehensive, and most effective API security offering.
Board Observer
Oct 2020
Nearly every company in the world runs on custom software, and we believe the future lies in being a force multiplier for developers. Retool unifies the ease of visual programming with the power of code, abstracting away the tedious and repetitive tasks of development. With Retool, you ship better apps and move your business forward—all in less time. Thousands of teams at companies like Amazon, DoorDash, Peloton, and Brex power their businesses and growth with Retool. Get started for free today, visit retool.com
Board Member
Dec 2019
Transform how your revenue team wins with AI✨ The Gong Revenue AI Operating System brings customer data, insights, and workflows together in one trusted place. 4,800+ companies rely on Gong to understand their business better, automate workflows, and win more. Follow our page for more updates.
Board Member
Mar 2019
Armis, the cyber exposure management & security company, protects the entire attack surface and manages an organization’s cyber risk exposure in real time. In a rapidly evolving, perimeter-less world, Armis ensures that organizations continuously see, protect and manage all critical assets - from the ground to the cloud. Armis secures Fortune 100, 200 and 500 companies as well as national governments, state and local entities to help keep critical infrastructure, economies and society stay safe and secure 24/7. Armis is a privately held company headquartered in California.
Board Member
Feb 2019
Aurora (Nasdaq: AUR) is delivering the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly to make transportation safer, increasingly accessible, and more reliable and efficient than ever before. The Aurora Driver is a self-driving system designed to operate multiple vehicle types, from freight-hauling trucks to ride-hailing passenger vehicles, and underpins Aurora Horizon and Aurora Connect, its driver-as-a-service products for trucking and ride-hailing. Aurora is working with industry leaders across the transportation ecosystem, including Toyota, FedEx, Volvo Trucks, PACCAR, Uber, Uber Freight, U.S. Xpress, Werner, Covenant, Schneider, and Ryder. For Aurora’s latest news, visit aurora.tech and @aurora_inno on Twitter.
Board Member
Oct 2018
**Snowflake is proud to be the Official Data Collaboration Provider for LA28 and Team USA.** Snowflake delivers the AI Data Cloud — a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Inside the AI Data Cloud, organizations unite their siloed data, easily discover and securely share governed data, and execute diverse analytic workloads. Wherever data or users live, Snowflake delivers a single and seamless experience across multiple public clouds. Snowflake’s platform is the engine that powers and provides access to the AI Data Cloud, creating a solution for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and data sharing. Join Snowflake customers, partners, and data providers already taking their businesses to new frontiers in the AI Data Cloud.
Board Member
Aug 2017
As of August 7, 2020, ThousandEyes is a part of Cisco. ThousandEyes delivers visibility into digital experiences delivered over the Internet. The world’s largest companies rely on our platform, collective intelligence and smart monitoring agents to get a real-time map of how their customers and employees reach and experience critical apps and services across traditional, SD-WAN, Internet and cloud provider networks. ThousandEyes is central to the global operations of the worlds largest and fastest growing brands, including 360+ of the Global 2000, 170+ of the Fortune 500 and 10 of the 10 top US banks.
Board Member
Jun 2017
A modern platform for the AI era Our mission at Cohesity is simple: to protect, secure, and provide insights into the world’s data. The largest organizations around the globe rely on us to strengthen their business resilience. With the Cohesity Data Cloud, we are able to deliver on that mission. Our customers can recover from cyber events faster, manage and secure their data at enterprise scale, and gain valuable insights with our industry-leading AI capabilities.
Board Member
Jan 2017
Bring teams together, reimagine workspaces, engage new audiences, and delight your customers –– all on the Zoom AI-first work platform you know and love. 💙 Zoomies help people stay connected so they can get more done together. We set out on a mission to make video communications frictionless and secure by building the world’s best video product for the enterprise, but we didn’t stop there. With products like AI Companion, Team Chat, Contact Center, Phone, Events, Rooms, Webinar, Contact Center and more, we bring innovation to a wide variety of customers, from the conference room to the classroom, from doctor’s offices to financial institutions to government agencies, from global brands to small businesses. We do what we do because of our core value of Care: care for our community, our customers, our company, our teammates, and ourselves. Our global employees help our customers meet happier, communicate better, and create meaningful connections the world over. Zoomies are problem-solvers and self-starters, working hard to get results and moving quickly to design solutions with our customers and users in mind. Here, youll find room to grow with opportunities to stretch your skills and advance your career in a collaborative, growth-focused environment. Learn more about careers at Zoom by visiting our careers site: https://careers.zoom.us/home
Board Member
Mar 2014
Palo Alto Networks, the global cybersecurity leader, is shaping the cloud-centric future with technology that is transforming the way people and organizations operate. Our mission is to be the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life. We help address the worlds greatest security challenges with continuous innovation that seizes the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, analytics, automation, and orchestration. By delivering an integrated platform and empowering a growing ecosystem of partners, we are at the forefront of protecting tens of thousands of organizations across clouds, networks, and mobile devices. Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. For more information, visit www.paloaltonetworks.com.
Experience · 17 entries
All (17)
Investments (16)
Board (16)
2022
Venture Partner
Dec 2022
Sequoia helps daring founders build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond. We aim to be the first true believers in tomorrow’s most consequential companies. We partner with a few outliers each year and go all-in, providing them with the hands-on help required at every stage of the company building journey. Our expertise comes from nearly 50 years of working with legendary founders like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Jan Koum, Brian Chesky, Tony Xu, Lin Qiao, Eric Yuan, Christina Cacioppo, and Patrick Collison. In aggregate, Sequoia-backed companies account for more than 30% of NASDAQs total value. The vast majority of the money we invest has been on behalf of nonprofits and schools like the Ford Foundation, Mayo Clinic and MIT, which means most of the returns we generate benefit these great causes.
Board Observer
Mar 2022
Democratizing AI on the Modern Data Stack The team behind PyG (PyG.org) is working on a turn-key solution for AI over large scale data warehouses. We believe the future of ML is a seamless integration between modern cloud data warehouses and AI algorithms. Our ML infrastructure massively simplifies the training and deployment of ML models on complex data. With over 40,000 monthly downloads and nearly 13,000 Github stars, PyG is the ultimate platform for training and development of Graph Neural Network (GNN) architectures. GNNs -- one of the hottest areas of machine learning now -- are a class of deep learning models that generalize Transformer and CNN architectures and enable us to apply the power of deep learning to complex data. GNNs are unique in a sense that they can be applied to data of different shapes and modalities.
2021
Board Member
Jun 2021
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Clouds actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions, while getting the visibility they need to run AI systems reliably and at scale. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,400+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital.
Board Member
Mar 2021
Cresta is the AI operating system for customer experience, where human and AI agents work together to power the entire customer lifecycle. Cresta automates conversations and back-office processes, augments human work, and puts insight into action, so each conversation makes the next one better. Companies like United Airlines, CVS Health, and Marriott use Cresta to turn every interaction into a competitive advantage. Learn more at Cresta.com.
2020
Board Member
Dec 2020
Salt Security protects the APIs that form the core of every modern application. Its patented API Protection Platform is the only API security solution that combines the power of cloud-scale big data and time-tested ML/AI to detect and prevent API attacks. By correlating activities across millions of APIs and users over time, Salt delivers deep context and actionable intelligence with real-time analysis and continuous insights for API discovery, attack prevention, and shift-left practices. Deployed quickly and seamlessly integrated within existing systems, the Salt Security platform gives customers immediate value and protection, so they can innovate with confidence and accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. By delivering context-based insights across the entire API lifecycle, Salt enables users to detect the reconnaissance activity of bad actors and block them before they can reach their objective. Through its unique API Context Engine (ACE) architecture, the Salt platform provides design analysis in pre-production, discovers all APIs, pinpoints and stops API attackers, and provides remediation insights. With a total funding of $271 million, Salt Security has a valuation of $1.4 billion. Its latest $140 Series D round, led by CapitalG, Alphabets independent growth fund, included participation from all existing investors, including Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, Tenaya Capital, S Capital VC, Advent International, Alkeon Capital, and DFJ Growth. Salt Security holds the only granted patent for using AI to identify and prevent API attacks and is the only solution that automatically and continuously discovers all APIs. This approach enables a complete and up-to-date inventory of all APIs. The Salt API security platform leads the market with the simplest, most comprehensive, and most effective API security offering.
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Investment activity
2014–2022 · 16 investments
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