Venture Capitalist Sarah Guo Ranks on Midas List After Early AI Bets

Sarah Guo, 37, debuted at No. 56 on this year’s Midas List of top venture capital investors after building an early-stage portfolio centered on artificial intelligence. She founded Conviction in October 2022 with a $101 million fund, one month before ChatGPT’s public release. The firm has backed 27 companies and taken board seats at six of them.

2019 Guo co-led a $3 million seed round for Baseten, writing a $1.5 million check. The company now holds a $5 billion valuation and has grown revenue more than tenfold in the past year. Her other holdings include legal AI firm Harvey, OpenEvidence, customer-service startup Sierra, coding tool Cognition and open-source developer Mistral.

Together the six companies are valued at $62 billion. Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg credited Guo with securing the firm’s first client at law firm A&O Shearman after thousands of cold LinkedIn messages.

Raised in Wisconsin by Chinese immigrant parents who founded Casa Systems, Guo built the company’s first website at age 14. She later worked at Goldman Sachs and joined Greylock in 2013 before leaving to start Conviction. She spends a quarter of her time reading research papers and meeting researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic.

Every two months she hosts “Mixture of Experts,” a networking event for founders and young professionals. Conviction general partner Mike Vernal said Guo’s technical questions during an April pitch for chip startup Fractile impressed the team, leading to a $220 million Series A investment.