Sequoia Capital is closing the London office it opened in 2020, and several people will leave the firm as a result. The decision appeared in a memo titled "The Sequoia of Tomorrow", which the firm posted to X on Wednesday. The same memo announces roughly $10 billion in new funds, the end of the Arc accelerator, launched in March 2022, and of the Scouts programme, and the merger of the early-stage and growth teams.
The memo says Europe will keep producing outlier founders and that Sequoia can support them from the Bay Area. It does not say the firm will stop funding Europeans. Luciana Lixandru, hired from Accel in 2020 as Sequoia's first partner in Europe, said she was offered a move to San Francisco and declined. "Europe is where my family is, and where I want to build," she wrote on X. She remains a partner, keeps her board seats and will invest personally in European founders.
Andreessen Horowitz closed its London office last year, and Coatue closed its own in 2024.
Reported by TechCrunch, via StrictlyVC, 2026-11-05
Monzo, the London digital bank, is reportedly exploring a new venture funding round that would value it at roughly $10.1 billion. The bank is 11 years old and has more than 16 million customers. The report follows the collapse of talks over a £10 billion takeover by Nubank. Discussions about selling a minority stake to buyout firms have also stalled.
Number 1 Greek Street, a Grade I listed building on a corner of Soho Square, has been closed for months and is being held by a security firm. Two guards who answered the door on Friday afternoon said they work for Mitmark, a security and intelligence company founded by army veterans. They did not know which client they were securing the building for, and said they had been asked not to let anyone in.
The building, also known as the House of Charity, has been a base for charitable work since at least 1861, latterly as the House of St Barnabas, a private members' club with a social mission. That club closed in 2024. In February, it was announced that the Explorers Club of New York, whose members include Jeff Bezos and Buzz Aldrin, could reopen the building as its London outpost while the charity work started up again. Since then, relations between The Explorers Club HQ and the British people driving the London project have fractured. The result is a standoff over the building, allegations of hacking and the involvement of the charities regulator. A private criminal prosecution may follow.
Each Sequoia partner makes perhaps one to three seed or pre-seed investments a year, according to a post that circulated this week. Jess Lee wrote that the firm's strategy is "quality over quantity". The post lists Dropbox, Stripe and Airbnb as past seed investments, and Setter, Ethos, Brud and Faire among more recent pre-seed and seed partnerships.
The post's author, who says they left a VC firm to raise their own fund, argues that a large fund cannot sensibly make many small bets. Sequoia is typically the lead investor, so it would have to support every company it backs. A big fund also needs enough ownership for any single investment to matter, which means putting in more at later rounds. The author says it can make more sense to wait for Series A and invest $5m or more.
The author puts the practical limit for a portfolio at about 50 companies, the point at which an outlier tends to appear. They also say 500 Startups tried a diversified portfolio model and that its returns were fine.
Defence startups start rolling up fragmented suppliers
Some defence startups are buying smaller, fragmented companies to build scale and win government contracts faster, according to Eveline Buchatskiy, managing partner at Ukrainian VC D3. She says she has seen this over the last 12 to 18 months. Some venture capitalists are sceptical that acquisitions of this kind are a sound basis for venture backing.
RMT members who drive London Underground trains will strike for 24 hours on 26 November, with further walkouts planned for 17 December, 19 December, 4 January, 6 January, 17 February, 23 February and 25 February. The union is opposing Transport for London plans that include a four-day working week.
The RMT says drivers would spend more time driving trains and work longer days. General secretary Eddie Dempsey called the plan "a wholesale attack on drivers' working conditions". TfL says the change would be voluntary and would mean fewer hours overall. Most drivers would move from a 36-hour week to 35 hours, with paid meal breaks keeping contractual hours the same. The RMT wants a 32-hour week over four days for the same salary.
About half of Tube drivers are RMT members. Aslef, which represents many of the others, said it was surprised by the strike. Strikes in the spring over the same issue closed some lines entirely, and talks since have not produced an agreement.
The actor and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge is giving early-career writers rent-free use of a flat she owns in London, according to a report in The Stage on 3 November 2026. The report was written by Katie Chambers.
The offer is part of an effort to help playwrights afford to work in the capital. The report describes the flat as one Waller-Bridge owns, and the arrangement as free of rent.
The portion of the report available here does not say how writers will be selected, how long each can stay, or when the first writer will move in. It also carries no quotation from Waller-Bridge or from anyone else involved.
Reported by The Stage, via The Londoner, 2026-11-05
Adam Robinson, 45, chief executive and co-founder of Retention.com, died on Sunday 1 November with his wife, Helen Sharp, 40, and their children, Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2. They were among nine people killed when a Learjet 60 flying from Austin to North Eleuthera in the Bahamas crashed into a neighbourhood in Palm Beach County, Florida.
On the day of the crash, Robinson posted that RB2B had reached $10m in annual recurring revenue. "RB2B is $10m ARR with 1 FTE," wrote Robinson, the Retention.com chief executive, adding that MoltSets, another business he led, was almost $1m. He had planned to debate Jesse Ouellette live on Tuesday over whether the two products should be combined. Ouellette believed combining them could reduce customer turnover and double revenue. Robinson favoured keeping them separate.
The jet left Austin-Bergstrom International Airport at about 10:37 a.m. with two crew and seven passengers. Federal investigators said on Monday that weather conditions are a major focus and that there are indications the aircraft began breaking apart before impact. The cause of the crash has not been determined.
Reported by Fox News, via The VC Corner, 2026-11-04
Crissy Field, a Hamburg security firm, scanned 159,041 projects built on the Swedish platform Lovable. It found 7,403 sites where records containing email addresses could be read without a login, spread across 10,560 tables. Other exposed material included passport numbers, payment information and more than 200,000 chat messages. The projects were published between December 2025 and September 2026. Handelsblatt worked with the researchers.
The cause is missing or overly broad Row Level Security rules in the Supabase databases that Lovable apps use. The researchers say the 30% figure applies only to the 24,664 sites examined closely and is not a confirmed leak rate. Nobody could establish whether anyone had already copied the data. Lovable's head of security, Igor Andriushchenko, says security is a shared responsibility between the platform and whoever publishes the app. A Supabase change that stops new tables being exposed automatically will apply to every existing project from 30 October 2026. Tables that already exist keep their current permissions.
The British Library plans to turn a quarter of its free-to-use reading rooms into paid-for flexible workspace, and staff are unhappy about it. At a town hall last month, employees took aim at interim chief executive Jeremy Silver, accusing library leadership of going in the wrong direction. Dr Paul Bate, the incoming chief executive, starts his new job today.
The plan follows a difficult stretch. In autumn 2023 a ransomware attack took down the library's systems, and staff and researchers went days without a full explanation or a fix. A system of paper request slips gave users access to some documents in an archive of more than 200 million books, papers and historic documents. The attack reached national news at the end of October 2023.
Current and former staff, from frontline roles to the top of the organisation, described financial pressures, staff tensions and four chief executives in less than two years. They called the library an organisation "in chaos" and lacking a "sense of direction". For Bate, the to-do list includes an ongoing crisis of confidence at the library.
