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Venture capital firms like Sequoia are utilizing dual-pricing strategies to inflate headline valuations while securing lower entry prices, creating a significant gap between market perception and actual capital deployment. This practice masks the true financial reality for founders and misleads employees and subsequent angel investors regarding a startup's actual worth. The controversy highlights a systemic opacity in valuation reporting that distorts the competitive landscape for AI and tech startups.

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Mercor’s Brendan Foody calls out Sequoia, accusing it of ‘dual-pricing’ valuation tricks

TechCrunchJune 9, 20265 min read

Sequoia is just one of the top firms that sells same equity at two different prices.

In recent days, founders and founders-turned-investors took to X to share horror stories about being mistreated by VCs. Their complaints ranged from VCs falling asleep during pitch meetings to investors suggesting a founder fire a co-founder. Brendan Foody, co-founder of the AI talent platform Mercor, which was last valued at $10 billion, went so far as to call out Sequoia, arguably one of the most elite VC firms in the world. “The “sequoia scam” is worse than a single horror story,” Foody wrote on X. “in the last 6 [months] ive seen a half dozen rounds where sequoia invests in 2 tranches. everyone pretends they…

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