Conviction Partners

Sarah Guo founded the firm. She spent close to a decade investing at Greylock Partners, where she became a general partner and built a reputation across enterprise software and security, then left in 2022 to raise her own vehicle.

Mike Vernal joined as general partner in January 2025 after almost seven years as a partner at Sequoia Capital, where he led investments in Notion, Rippling, and Verkada, and eight years at Facebook as a vice president of product and engineering. Pranav Reddy is a founding investor whose background pairs neuroscience research with engineering work; he was a founding engineer and engineering manager at the search company Neeva. Bella Garcia-Camargo is also part of the founding investment team. The partnership is deliberately small, which fits a strategy built on leading seed and Series A rounds rather than running a large deal-flow operation.

Sarah Guo left Greylock Partners in July 2022 and launched Conviction that October with a $101 million debut fund, an unusually concentrated vehicle for a solo general partner and one raised before the current wave of AI financing.

Fund II closed in January 2025 at $230 million, more than double the first vehicle, announced alongside the addition of Mike Vernal as general partner. That puts roughly $331 million across the two disclosed funds. Conviction writes checks from $1 million to $25 million and positions itself as a first institutional investor rather than a follower. It also runs Embed, a structured program that places $250,000 into very early companies on an uncapped most-favored-nation SAFE or at the price of a recent round, which widens the top of the funnel without committing fund reserves. The firm describes its mandate as serving AI-native Software 3.0 companies across infrastructure, applications, and vertical products.