Sequoia raised $10B and closed its London office

The firm that raised the expansion fund is unwinding the expansion

Sequoia Capital said it has raised roughly $10 billion in new funds while closing its London office and ending several programmes, TechCrunch reported, unwinding 20 years of expansion to concentrate on Silicon Valley. The ledger's record on Sequoia Capital makes the turn sharper than the headline figure does: the firm's $7 billion expansion strategy fund, its largest late-stage vehicle ever, was raised in April 2026 for late-stage investing in the US and Europe. Seven months later the European office is the thing being closed.

Creandum went the other way on the same week, raising $750 million for its eighth and largest fund after tripling its San Francisco presence over the past two years, Sifted reported. That is continuous with how the Stockholm firm already raised: more than half the capital in its oversubscribed €500 million Fund VII came from US investors, by Tech Funding News's account of the 2024 close. Private venture capital is not leaving Europe so much as both sides of it are routing through one valley.

Who actually underwrote Europe's rounds today

Four of the European and UK items in today's investments digest name a public institution in the syndicate.

• TEKEVER secured €13 million from Denmark's export and investment fund EIFO as part of a €520 million Series D, with the Lisbon defence drone maker using the Danish cheque to build out Nordic operations (EU-Startups).
• VÆRIDION raised a €30 million Series A2 co-led by SHIFT Invest and Invest-NL, and was separately selected for a €94.5 million European Commission Innovation Fund grant, still subject to an agreement expected in 2027 (EU-Startups).
• T-Therapeutics closed an oversubscribed $133 million Series B co-led by Advent Life Sciences and the British Business Bank, with Johnson & Johnson's JJDC, Samsara BioCapital, M-Ventures and Lilly joining the Cambridge biotech (European Biotechnology).
• The European Innovation Council adopted a €1.8 billion 2027 work programme that doubles individual Women TechEU grants to €150k, completes a €1 billion commitment to the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund and finishes a €200 million defence allocation (EU-Startups).

The ledger's note on the EIC Accelerator is the relevant background: the instrument has no American equivalent, pairing a grant for the research risk with direct equity for the scale-up risk, and it has €634 million to deploy in 2026 as grants below €2.5 million and equity cheques of €0.5 million to €10 million (European Innovation Council).

The largest European figure of the day was bank debt

Return secured €835 million in portfolio financing underwritten by Deutsche Bank and Rabobank, which the Amsterdam battery storage company will spend installing at least 1 GW of German capacity a year from 2027 (EU-Startups). Titan OS raised €40 million from existing backers Highland Europe and Mangrove Capital Partners plus a credit facility from BlackRock-managed funds, taking the Barcelona smart TV operating system to €97 million raised (EU-Startups). The two biggest European numbers on the page are a bank facility and a part-credit round, not growth equity.

What the concentrated money bought

OpenAI closed $11 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, the first tranche of a round it had opened seeking up to $30 billion at $1.4 trillion, with SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz among the investors (Bloomberg). The tranche that closed came in under the mark the round was opened at, which is worth holding next to the valuations further down the same page: Applied Compute raised $350 million at a $3.25 billion valuation led by Elad Gil, and Traversal raised $120 million at a $1 billion valuation (Crunchbase News).

Read together, today's two digests describe one allocation decision made twice. The firm with the longest record of global expansion has concluded the returns are within driving distance of Menlo Park, and Europe's deepest technical rounds, in drones, regional aircraft and cell therapy, closed with an export agency, a national investment bank and the European Commission inside the syndicate. That is not a gap being filled by accident; it is the gap showing up in the cap table.