Contrarian Ventures

Conviction is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence-focused venture capital firm founded in October 2022 by Sarah Guo, who spent nearly a decade as a General Partner at Greylock Partners where she was the firm's youngest-ever GP. The firm's name encapsulates its core philosophy: that in an era flooded with information, holding a well-formed belief steadily enough and long enough to act on it is the primary source of value in early-stage investing. Conviction closed its debut Fund I at $101 million in late 2022 and followed with a $230 million Fund II closed in January 2025 with former Sequoia Capital partner Mike Vernal joining as a partner, bringing total assets under management to approximately $330 million. The firm invests at seed and Series A stages with initial checks from $1 million to $10 million in AI-native companies, businesses that are using large language models, generative AI, and machine learning as the core foundation of their product. Mistral AI, the French open-source large language model company, is valued at $6 billion. Harvey, the AI legal platform, was most recently valued at $11 billion after raising $200 million in March 2026. Cognition AI, the AI software engineering agent company behind the Devin coding assistant, is a portfolio company. Baseten, the inference infrastructure platform, is valued at $825 million. Sierra, the conversational AI platform co-founded by Bret Taylor, is valued at $4.5 billion. Beyond its original investments in Mistral AI, Harvey, Cognition AI, Baseten, and Pika, the portfolio of 47 companies includes HeyGen, Stackblitz, and OpenEvidence.