Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸

talent eng @spacexai | 👼 forward deployed angels | 2x founder | @uwaterloo

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

Founders have an incredibly difficult job.

Creating something from nothing is insanely hard.

I try to provide more than just capital and be as useful as possible in removing barriers so founders can focus on building.

It’s a privilege to be working with unapologetically ambitious founders like @weberwongwong

[weber @weberwongwong]

enough about forward-deployed engineers

we need more forward-deployed angels

was thinking about this because one of our angels Umesh Khanna (@forwarddeploy) has just been pulling up on Sundays and going deep with us on the product problems we're dealing with, designing growth loops, sharpening our "aha" moments and more. It’s been super helpful

very lucky to have him aboard the FLORA cap table

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

@joshpxyne This is the way

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

Canadian legend 🇨🇦

[Evan McCann @evansammccann]

The Quiet Force. My profile of @AlexKolicich is out.

Raised by a single mom in Hamilton. Google engineer. Peter Thiel’s math guy. Founding partner of 8VC.

“8VC is 8VC because of Alex.” I was told.

I spent months reporting his story in SF, Palo Alto and Orange County, talking with founders and the people who knew him at Clarium, Mithril and 8VC.

Highlights
- Peter Thiel playing blindfolded chess
- Turning down Geoffrey Hinton’s lab twice
- Dreaming about oil
- Back story on 8VC's investments in Quince, Cognition and Anduril

Link to read below.

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

A wonderful investor who truly has founders first

Thank you for taking me under your wing when I first became a scout 🙏

[Stephanie Zhan @stephzhan]

I’m starting a new early-stage AI fund, doing what I love: partnering with founders from company formation on bold bets, long before consensus.

The fund’s LPs will include Sequoia, Jeff Dean, Sachin Katti, Philip Wong (my Stanford professor and Chief Scientist adviser to TSMC), and others whose work has shaped our industry and how I think about AI’s future.

I’ll remain a partner at Sequoia and keep serving on my boards on Sequoia’s behalf.

Sequoia has been my home for the past 11 years. I joined as the youngest investor the firm had ever hired. I grew up here. Through years of intense debate and shared work, I found lifelong mentors and friends who took me under their wing and taught me this craft. They taught me to aim high and take big swings. I’ll carry that into what I build: outsized ambition, relentless truth-seeking and curiosity, and a refusal to become complacent.

Working alongside founders has made me want to build something of my own: a firm shaped from day one around the convictions I’ve developed over the past decade.

Life has taught me not to take time for granted. This is how I want to spend mine.

Why now

We’re seeing a new way of building companies in today’s AI era. Research and products often advance together. A breakthrough can open a market or accelerate a business far faster than expected. Some companies require extraordinary capital and compute early on. Others reach meaningful scale with remarkably small teams. The rules for how big these businesses can get, and how fast, are being rewritten.

But early on, the technology is unproven, the resources required enormous, and the vision seemingly implausible.

This is what I love most: seeing the potential right from the beginning, and helping founders realize their full scale of ambition.

More than ever, it starts with an extreme willingness to believe early, with bold, independent conviction in a founder’s technical insight before any product or market validation. Then, it means helping founders take the biggest swings, giving the rare, long-term patience to see those bets through uncertainty, ambiguity, and turbulence, and serving as a level head when the stakes are highest.

I learned this kind of partnership at Sequoia. It’s the foundation of the firm I’m building.

Believing before consensus

My fascination with AI’s potential took root at Stanford in the early-to-mid 2010s, studying computer science and working in Andrew Ng’s lab. The friendships I formed connected me to a community whose people and ideas would help shape modern AI and build some of our generation’s defining companies. What stayed with me was the gap between what those people saw was possible and what the wider world could imagine.

I’m drawn to founders pursuing ambitions that sound impossible today.

I start with a simple question: “What if everything goes right?”

Then we work backward together to make it happen.

In 2023, Deepak and Abhinav set out to build a general-purpose robot brain at @SkildAI, before physical AI was a consensus bet. Their sim-to-real breakthroughs gave me conviction where earlier robotics approaches had fallen short. But the data flywheel required deployment at scale. We made commercialization as urgent as research and brought in strategic partners like NVIDIA and SoftBank to support the ambition. Three years in, Skild is advancing the frontier of physical AI with nine figures in annualized revenue.

In 2024, Ioannis and Misha founded @reflection_ai with an insight into scaling reinforcement learning. As that grew into the ambition to build a Western frontier lab for open models, the hard question was how a startup competes with labs spending tens of billions. An introduction to NVIDIA and many compute calls and recruiting events later, the team has built Beam, now one of the leading US open models.

In 2025, Anna and Azalia, the co-creators of AlphaChip, founded @RicursiveAI to design models and hardware together. From day one, we made early customers and ecosystem partners a priority. Today, they are showing order-of-magnitude improvements on real workloads, working with some of the industry’s most consequential players, and reaching a defining inflection point.

The ambition keeps growing as these companies scale.

@linear has always had a kind of magic to it. Now it’s the system a new generation of AI companies builds on, for teams and agents alike.

@tavus saw early that we’d one day talk to AI the way we talk to each other. Today, it’s building the human computing interface for a world of AI colleagues.

@Mach_Industries began as hydrogen experiments in an MIT dorm room. It has since become one of the most exciting next-generation defense companies.

Making the ambition possible

Being a first believer is only the beginning. Compute falls through. A deep-pocketed incumbent makes your mission its top priority. A breakthrough changes the opportunity and the capital required overnight.

These are stomach-churning moments, and early belief carries a responsibility to help make the bet work.

This is the partnership I love: turning the full ambition into concrete steps. Raising capital, securing compute and strategic partners, recruiting exceptional people, and winning the first customers together. Thinking several moves ahead while solving what’s in front of us. And as breakthroughs open new possibilities, helping founders dream even bigger.

Thank you

To the founders I’ve worked with: thank you for trusting me and Sequoia to be your first partner and first believer. It’s been the joy of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to keep building together.

Thank you to Alfred and Pat for your leadership of Sequoia and your support of my next chapter. To Roelof, for bringing me into Sequoia and believing in me from the beginning. Alfred and Roelof, you have been mentors in investing and in life. So much of what I know, and the investor I’ve become, comes from your guidance and generosity over the years. To Bill, for the close partnership and wealth of knowledge, always wrapped in humility. To Shaun, for showing me how to think deeply and imaginatively. To Michael Moritz, for inspiring 22-year-old me to dream big. To Doug, for teaching me to keep things simple. To Bogie and Jess, for bringing joy to the everyday and perspective on what matters. And to all my Sequoia teammates, for the friendship, camaraderie, and lessons I’ll carry with me.

To my family, especially my husband and my brother, who have each started companies of their own: thank you for giving me the courage to take this leap.

Let’s get to work!

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

@evansammccann @AlexKolicich An incredible legend!!

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

@Baconbrix @bot 🫣🫣🫣

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

@adijayaprakash @sequoia Congrats!

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

Incredible growth from the team

Also 🇨🇦

[Aditya Jayaprakash @adijayaprakash]

@sequoia is leading our Series C at a $1B valuation.

We started Blacksmith in 2024 to make CI faster and less painful. In January we ran 5 million CI jobs a week. Today it's over 90 million and growing, and we’re still early.

[Ronak Malde @rronak_]

@JensenHuang at GTC:

"Here's Trajectory and Harvey using Nemotron, post-trained it and created their own frontier-level capability."

"With customization and with partners in the ecosystem that we work with, you could turn these models into the frontier.

And a result, turn your proprietary data into sovereign intelligence"

It's great to be doing work with such amazing companies like @harvey and @nvidia over here at @trajectorylabs!

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

@ivanburazin @pzakin @daytonaio @FirstMarkCap Congrats!

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

Such an incredible team!

[Ivan Burazin @ivanburazin]

We just raised a $60M Series B at a $1B valuation to build @daytonaio into the Agent Cloud.

@FirstMarkCap led the round, with all key existing investors and angels doubling down.

We're also thrilled to welcome the founders of some generational companies aboard, including @patrickc (Stripe), @tobi (Shopify), @AravSrinivas (Perplexity), @BrendanFoody (Mercor), @oliveur (Datadog), @adamdangelo (Quora) and @ericsyuan (Zoom)

We're a 35-person team. But that's about to change; we're hiring across the board, and we'd love for you to join us.

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

@juicebox_work @cambridgemike @X Huge!

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

@RoryOReilly @KnotAPIs Huge!!

[Rory O'Reilly @RoryOReilly]

I couldn't be more excited to announce Supernova by @KnotAPIs.

For years, we've poured our hearts and souls into building the technology behind Knot.

Today, it powers more than 1 million actions every day for some of the largest financial institutions in the world.

Now, we're putting that same technology in your hands: Supernova turns virtually any action on any website into an API.

Tell Supernova what you want to do and Supernova, if needed, uses a VM to learn the action once, then turns it into a reusable API. Frictionless authentication, persistent connections, health checks, self-healing, and ongoing maintenance? All handled by Supernova.

The result: An API you can call over and over, without spinning up a browser every time.

Think about what this unlocks:

🛒 Commerce: Build APIs to search, shop, and purchase across retailers.
🏦 Financial services: Connect accounts, retrieve transactions, and manage payments.
🚀 Entrepreneurs: Build the next Finicity/Plaid/MX for procurement, Stripe for returns, or an entirely new API business.

Everything we've built at Knot is proof of what's possible. But our products are just a handful of ideas from one team.

Our ambition isn't just to build the next great Knot product. It's to help you build tens of thousands of your own, including things we never would have imagined.

We're opening the Supernova waitlist to developers, and we can't wait to see what you build.

Sign up for the waitlist below👇

https://t.co/cuDBsp4ef5

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

@cattttang @neilmovva @substratemag Soo good!

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

Called it almost a year ago, congrats on the launch fellas

https://t.co/GIvivz5bjN

[Daanish Khazi @bertgodel]

We are releasing Ultramarine 1 Flash, a frontier-class model built for knowledge work. It is open-source and achieves similar performance to Fable 5, while being 60x cheaper.

It was post-trained by a team of 5 for ~$300k all-in. Available on API now, with weights releasing in 2 weeks.

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

@bertgodel Holy smokes!

[Daanish Khazi @bertgodel]

We are releasing Ultramarine 1 Flash, a frontier-class model built for knowledge work. It is open-source and achieves similar performance to Fable 5, while being 60x cheaper.

It was post-trained by a team of 5 for ~$300k all-in. Available on API now, with weights releasing in 2 weeks.

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving 🇨🇦🇺🇸

(super delayed post)

[Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 @forwarddeploy]

@RoryOReilly @kieransoreilly @money2020 @KnotAPIs 🚀🚀🚀

[Rory O'Reilly @RoryOReilly]

At our first @money2020, @KnotAPIs had one product and a pitch most people hadn’t heard before: let consumers move their card to a merchant in a few taps.

This year we arrive with record quarter-over-quarter growth, millions of connected merchant accounts, and our most exciting partnership opportunities yet.

The conversation has changed. We’re no longer explaining why Knot should exist. Prospects experience Knot for the first time in the apps they already use, everyone understands the revenue opportunity, and financial institutions want Knot live before they’re the only ones without it.

What started with CardSwitcher has become something much bigger: infrastructure that connects users to their merchant accounts, automates actions, and keeps those connections working securely at scale. CardSwitcher has become the perfect wedge into selling additional products, and new Knot cross-sells have surpassed even my own expectations.

In the past few months, the market has moved entirely in our favor too. Merchant connectivity is the layer the whole industry decided it needed. Issuers want top of wallet, networks want their token in the merchant file, and nobody wants a third party disintermediating the relationship between them and the consumer. It’s now clear that whoever owns the connectivity layer owns the consumer relationship.

We’re heading into Vegas with more excitement and a fuller calendar than ever: issuers, partners we couldn’t have dreamed of, and everyone wanting a piece of the merchant connectivity layer.

The question is no longer why Knot, or whether Knot works: It’s who will own the connection between users and merchants.