Skip to main content

Bogomil Balkansky

  • Seed/Early
I’m a very intuitive person. If I try to be overly rational and put all the pros and cons in a spreadsheet, I get myself into trouble. But if I follow my gut, I rarely make mistakes.

Backstory

Happenstance has been a theme in my life—that, and being open to opportunities. I found myself in the U.S. because I was lucky enough to come of age right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and got a scholarship that made it possible for me to leave communist Bulgaria. I started swimming with whales because a wildlife photographer I follow on Instagram put out an invitation for a trip. And I’m at Sequoia not because I planned to become a VC, but because fate connected me with the right people—namely Roelof, who I knew from Stanford GSB, and Carl, who I’d worked with closely for years at VMware.

On the lookout for

Markets come and go, so we need to move in lockstep with their evolution. The logical domains for me are cloud infrastructure, developer tools, DevOps, open source, observability as well as SaaS apps for sales and marketing, because that’s where my background is. But I try to follow the advice several of my partners gave me when I first joined Sequoia—don’t specialize too narrowly, and get out of my comfort zone.

In terms of specific companies and entrepreneurs, I’m looking for the same things I did when I was running large teams and hiring people: iconoclastic thinking, the courage to break paradigms, defiance of common wisdom. Ideas that aren’t obvious and that challenge my own assumptions. I’m also looking for charisma, but that can manifest in different ways. Maybe you’re a great salesperson, but maybe you’re a deep thinker or an amazing technologist or an exceptional recruiter. It’s magnetism.

Get in touch with Bogomil

Personal Side

Press & Media

Companies

Current Companies

Company Name  Short Description Current Stage  Founders First Partnered  collapse
BigeyeBigeye improves data quality at scale with observability, incident management and automation.Growth
  • Egor Gryaznov
  • Kyle Kirwan
Early (2021)Collapse
ChainguardChainguard helps organizations secure their software supply chains through products, tooling, and education.Early
  • Ville Aikas
  • Kim Lewandowski
  • Dan Lorenc
  • Matt Moore
Early (2022)Collapse
ChkkChkk keeps complex Kubernetes environments up and running.Seed
  • Fawad Khaliq
  • Ali Khayam
  • Awais Nemat
Seed (2022)Collapse
CloseFactorCloseFactor transforms the B2B go-to-market process with machine intelligence Early
  • Erik Buchanan
  • Ben Cheung
  • Leena Joshi
Seed (2021)Collapse
CoanaCoana scans for security vulnerabilities in open source dependencies.Seed
  • Benjamin Barslev
  • Anders Møller
  • Anders Søndergaard
  • Martin Torp
Seed (2023)Collapse
CortexCortex helps engineering teams improve their service-oriented architecture.Early
  • Ganesh Datta
  • Anish Dhar
  • Nikhil Unni
Seed (2020)Collapse
CyeraCyera transforms the way organizations secure data in the cloud with Data Reality.Early
  • Tamar Bar-Ilan
  • Yotam Segev
Early (2022)Collapse
InfracostInfracost helps engineering teams understand how their code changes will affect their cloud costs.Early
  • Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini
  • Ali Khajeh-Hosseini
  • Alistair Scott
Seed (2021)Collapse
MutinyMutiny is a no-code AI platform helping marketers convert their top-of-funnel demand into revenue.Growth
  • Nikhil Mathew
  • Jaleh Rezaei
Early (2021)Collapse
Oasis SecurityOasis is the first enterprise platform for non-human identity management.Early
  • Danny Brickman
  • Amit Zimerman
Seed (2023)Collapse
PartyKitPartyKit is an open source platform for building real-time multiplayer collaborative applications.Seed
  • Sunil Pai
Seed (2023)Collapse
PydanticPydantic is a data validation library for Python.Arc
  • Samuel Colvin
Seed (2023)Collapse
ReleaseRelease provides ephemeral environments as a service that can be used in QA and staging.Early
  • David Giffin
  • Erik Landerholm
  • Tommy McClung
Seed (2020)Collapse
RocksetRockset is a real-time analytics at cloud scale.Growth
  • Dhruba Borthakur
  • Venkat Venkataramani
Seed (2016)Collapse
Temporal TechnologiesTemporal enables any software application to handle failures gracefully and in a user-friendly way.Growth
  • Samar Abbas
  • Maxim Fateev
Seed (2019)Collapse
WizWiz secures everything built and run in the cloud.Growth
  • Yinon Costica
  • Ami Luttwak
  • Assaf Rappaport
  • Roy Reznik
Early (2020)Collapse
Zeet.coZeet makes it easier to interact with your cloud, so you can spend your time building applications instead of configuring infrastructure. Arc
  • Johnny Dallas
  • Zihao Zhang
Seed (2022)Collapse