Who was LinkedIn's first venture capital investor?

LinkedIn’s first venture capital investor was Sequoia Capital. The firm led LinkedIn’s Series A investment in late 2003, shortly after the professional networking company launched.

Sequoia’s early backing helped LinkedIn build its service during a period when social networking was still developing. The company had been founded in December 2002 by Reid Hoffman and a small team of former PayPal and SocialNet colleagues, then opened to users in May 2003.

A common mix-up is confusing LinkedIn’s first venture capital investor with its early individual backers. Peter Thiel, a former PayPal colleague of Hoffman, also invested in LinkedIn, but Sequoia Capital is the canonical answer for the first venture capital firm. Greylock Partners and other firms became significant investors later, including in a 2008 financing round that valued LinkedIn at roughly $1 billion.

Sequoia’s investment was an early signal that LinkedIn could become a major professional platform rather than merely another social-networking experiment.