Peak XV is far from the Sequoia tree. Can it retain its parent’s aura?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: What’s in a name? A lot, apparently, if you’re in the venture capital business, as one firm named after the world’s tallest mountain is fast realizing. In 1865, a few years after Andrew Waugh, the then surveyor general of India, proposed that it be named after his predecessor Sir George Everest, the peak was officially named Mount Everest.

Until then, the British used to refer to the 8,850-metre-tall protrusion in the Himalayas as Peak XV. And Peak XV was the name the Indian inheritors of Sequoia’s India and Southeast Asia business chose in June 2023, after the venerated venture capital firm decided to spin it off (Sequoia had also separated from its China arm at the same time). The name was partly inspired by a trip managing director Mohit Bhatnagar, one of the three longest-serving members of Sequoia India, had made to the Everest base camp, and also by the ‘climb high, sleep low’ philosophy of mountain climbing.

The idea being to acclimatize the body rather than suddenly doing something adventurous. But the new name hasn’t quite done the trick for the venture investor. Instead, it appears to have suffered an erosion in brand value since losing the Sequoia moniker.

Earlier this month, the fund’s general partners decided to reduce their compensation from its growth fund, a move that may have been prompted by this hard reality. The 16%—$465 million—cut in its current $2.85 billion fund for deployment across seed, venture and growth stages at a time when most global investors are bullish on India also took observers by surprise. All of this aside, a few other things have gone awry for the investor in the last 18 months, especially with a slew of corporate governance issues