# Carl Eschenbach

> Carl Eschenbach is a Series B investor at Sequoia Capital backing Machine Learning. See 18 investments, check sizes, portfolio. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: Angel Investor
- Fund: [Sequoia Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/sequoia-capital)
- Location: San Francisco, United States
- Total investments: 18
- Last investment: Nov 2024
- Lead investor: 61%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carl-eschenbach-980543/
- X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/carl_eschenbach
- Website: https://x.com/carl_eschenbach
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carl.eschenbach

Carl Eschenbach is a Series B investor at Sequoia Capital in San Francisco focused on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Carl Eschenbach is based out of Pleasanton, California, and is the Partner of Sequoia Capital and also a Board Member of Cresta. Carl Eschenbach attended DeVry University.

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Machine Learning | 4 | 22% |
| Artificial Intelligence | 4 | 22% |
| Software | 3 | 17% |
| SaaS | 2 | 11% |
| Sales | 2 | 11% |

33 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Series B | 5 | 28% |
| Series C | 5 | 28% |
| Series D | 4 | 22% |
| Series A | 3 | 17% |
| Series E | 1 | 6% |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Cresta | Cresta uses artificial intelligence to assist sales and service agents with customer service tasks. it provides tools for managing inquiries. Cresta focuses on facilitating communication between agents and customers. | $125M | Series D | Nov 19, 2024 |  |
| Kumo.AI | Kumo.AI is a SaaS AI platform that allows anyone in an organization to tackle predictive problems in business. It enables all non-technical and technical users, regardless of ML experience, to traverse all the major steps of a best practice ML lifecycle.The platform's users can immediately tackle a wide variety of predictive problems all ina single sitting, in application areas such as new customer acquisition, customer loyalty and retention, personalization and next best action, entity resolution and knowledge graph curation, abuse detection, financial crime detection, generation of ML features for data science teams, and more.Kumo.AI was founded in 2021 and is based in Mountain View, California. | $18M | Series B | Sep 27, 2022 |  |
| Kumo.AI | Kumo.AI is a SaaS AI platform that allows anyone in an organization to tackle predictive problems in business. It enables all non-technical and technical users, regardless of ML experience, to traverse all the major steps of a best practice ML lifecycle.The platform's users can immediately tackle a wide variety of predictive problems all ina single sitting, in application areas such as new customer acquisition, customer loyalty and retention, personalization and next best action, entity resolution and knowledge graph curation, abuse detection, financial crime detection, generation of ML features for data science teams, and more.Kumo.AI was founded in 2021 and is based in Mountain View, California. | $18.5M | Series A | Apr 07, 2022 |  |
| Grafana Labs | Grafana Labs supports organizations’ monitoring, visualization and observability goals through an open and composable platform built around Grafana, the open source software for beautiful monitoring and metric analytics and visualization. Grafana Labs’ commercial products include Grafana Enterprise, with key features and support for largeorganizations, and Grafana Cloud, a hosted Grafana-based stack that includes Prometheus and Graphite (for metrics) and Loki (for logs). | $240M | Series D | Apr 06, 2022 |  |
| Salt Security | Salt Security is an API security company based in Palo Alto, California. It provides an API protection platform to prevent attacks, using machine learning and AI to automatically and continuously identify and protect APIs. Deployed in minutes, the platform learns the granular behavior of a company’s APIs and requires no configuration orcustomization to pinpoint and block API attackers.The company was founded in 2018 and led by co-founder and CEO Roey Eliyahu and by co-founder & COO Michael Nicosia. | $140M | Series D | Feb 10, 2022 |  |
| Retool | Retool is a provider of a tool development platform intended to help build custom business tools without having any programming language knowledge. The company's platform creates interfaces to display and manipulate data faster and more accurately with custom workflows, enabling businesses to focus on their product and expertise while givingtheir operation development teams the tools they need to succeed. | $20M | Series C | Dec 22, 2021 |  |
| Grafana Labs | Grafana Labs supports organizations’ monitoring, visualization and observability goals through an open and composable platform built around Grafana, the open source software for beautiful monitoring and metric analytics and visualization. Grafana Labs’ commercial products include Grafana Enterprise, with key features and support for largeorganizations, and Grafana Cloud, a hosted Grafana-based stack that includes Prometheus and Graphite (for metrics) and Loki (for logs). | $220M | Series C | Aug 24, 2021 |  |
| Gong | Gong is a revenue intelligence company that analyzes sales conversations and customer interactions. The company captures and processes data from various communication channels. It provides insights related to sales performance and customer engagement. Gong serves industries including technology, finance, and healthcare. | $250M | Series E | Jun 03, 2021 |  |
| Salt Security | Salt Security is an API security company based in Palo Alto, California. It provides an API protection platform to prevent attacks, using machine learning and AI to automatically and continuously identify and protect APIs. Deployed in minutes, the platform learns the granular behavior of a company’s APIs and requires no configuration orcustomization to pinpoint and block API attackers.The company was founded in 2018 and led by co-founder and CEO Roey Eliyahu and by co-founder & COO Michael Nicosia. | $70M | Series C | May 26, 2021 |  |
| Cresta | Cresta uses artificial intelligence to assist sales and service agents with customer service tasks. it provides tools for managing inquiries. Cresta focuses on facilitating communication between agents and customers. | $50M | Series B | Mar 31, 2021 |  |

10 of 18 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Coatue](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/coatue) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [Lightspeed Venture Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/lightspeed-venture-partners) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [Tenaya Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/tenaya-capital) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [Y Combinator](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/y-combinator) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [DFJ Growth](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/dfj-growth) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [Greylock](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/greylock) — VC Fund, 3 deals together

## About Sequoia Capital

VC Fund · Menlo Park, United States

Sequoia is a venture capital focused on energy, financial, enterprise, healthcare, internet, and mobile startups. The firm helps a small number of daring founders build legendary companies. It spurs them to push the boundaries of what’s possible.The firm seeks to invest in all sectors with a focus on energy, financials and financial services,healthcare and healthcare services, Internet, mobile, outsourcing, and technology.

5 contacts available at Sequoia Capital.

| Name | Title | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Anas Biad | Partner | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/anas-biad |
| Andrew Lee | Vice President | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/andrew-lee |
| Carl Eschenbach | Partner | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/carl-eschenbach |
| Caroline Fu | Vice President | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/caroline-fu |
| Donald Valentine | Founder | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/don-valentine |

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## FAQ

### What does Carl Eschenbach invest in?

Carl Eschenbach invests primarily in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Software startups, most often at Series B and Series C stage. Most of the 18 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.

### When did Carl Eschenbach last invest?

The most recent investment recorded for Carl Eschenbach closed in Nov 2024. Shizune tracks 18 investments in total for this profile, including round sizes, stages and portfolio companies, all sourced from confirmed public funding rounds and refreshed monthly.

### Is Shizune's investor data accurate?

Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Aug 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.

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