Sequoia Capital To Improve Due Diligence After FTX Crypto Exchange Fiasco

After writing off its entire investment in the crypto exchange FTX (FTT/USD), Sequoia Capital apologized to its fund investors for the $150 million it lost.
Last week, SoftBank said it had put less than $100 million and had kept the investment marked close to cost rather than boosting the valuation and recording a profit.
SoftBank will likely write down the holding in the December quarter.
The venture capital firm also told the fund investors that it would improve its due-diligence process on future investments and that it believed FTX misled it based on its recent bankruptcy filing.
Sequoia was one of the venture investors who piled roughly $2 billion into FTX amid last year’s boom in crypto investment.
Sequoia invested the bulk of its cash in a Series B funding round for FTX in July 2021, when investor fervor for cryptocurrency startups hit an all-time high.
FTX, based in the Bahamas, and its U.S. arm used a pair of smaller auditing firms to sign off on their 2021 financial statements earlier this year, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal, and the executive hired to shepherd FTX through bankruptcy has expressed “substantial concerns” about the quality of FTX’s audited statements.
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