Sierra Ventures
Sierra Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm founded by Peter Wendell in 1982 and headquartered in San Mateo, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The firm invests from inception through Series A in first-principles founders under the tagline "Conviction Before Consensus," writing checks of up to $5M at seed and up to $10M at Series A. Sierra's current investment thesis centers on the next wave of enterprise technology: Vertical AI (purpose-built AI for specific industries), Infrastructure AI, Frontier and Deep Tech, and Physical AI and Robotics, alongside a longstanding history in enterprise applications, digital health, SaaS, and security. Over its 40-plus-year history the firm has invested more than $2 billion across 13 early-stage funds, with its 13th fund closing in 2023 at $265 million, following Fund 12 at $215 million and Fund 11 at $170 million. Sierra reports 35 IPOs and hundreds of successful exits, having backed companies such as Elastic, Astronomer, Chronosphere, CourseHero, Q-CTRL, Spectro Cloud, Endor Labs, and Reflection AI. The firm is notable for its CXO Advisory Board of Fortune 1000 enterprise leaders who help portfolio companies land early customers. This profile tracks Sierra Ventures' identity and its portfolio graph across the API Evangelist network.
Sierra Ventures has 84 portfolio companies tracked on the APIs.io network, of which 34 (40%) publish APIs indexed here. The remaining 50 are tracked as profiles without a published API on the network.
Its highest-rated API providers on the network are Elastic, Spectro Cloud, Chronosphere, Hashnode, Band AI.
Portfolio on the Network
Portfolio companies that publish APIs indexed on APIs.io, grouped by their API Evangelist rating. Exemplar and Strong are expanded by default.
Exemplar 3 Complete, well-documented, and agent-ready
Developing 13 Usable, with meaningful gaps to close
Thin 9 Limited public surface area
Properties
Portfolio
Where the firm publishes its investments
Firm
The firm itself
Cohort brief
Auto-generatedThe 80 portfolio companies with APIs in the catalog, backed by Sierra Ventures, scored on the Kin Score. Every figure below is computed from the catalog — nothing here is written.
| Facet | This cohort | Catalog | Difference | Scored |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Access Clarity | 31 | 26.4 | +4.6 | 80 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 25.3 | 23.1 | +2.2 | 80 |
| Discoverability | 59.4 | 58.2 | +1.2 | 80 |
| Operational Transparency | 13.9 | 13.6 | +0.3 | 80 |
| Contract Governance | 5.3 | 6.3 | -1 | 80 |
| Contract Quality | 16.3 | 17.6 | -1.3 | 80 |
A facet is averaged over the members that carry it, not over the whole cohort — the “Scored” column is that count. Averaging an absent facet as zero would score our own coverage gaps as the providers’ posture.
| Artifact | This cohort | Catalog | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| MCP server (any) | 15% | 15% | 0 |
| MCP server (first-party) | 15% | 12% | +3 |
| Agent Skills | 0% | 0% | 0 |
| OAuth scopes | 4% | 11% | -7 |
| Security | 100% | 98% | +2 |
| Arazzo workflows | 1% | 2% | -1 |
| Governance rules | 5% | 13% | -8 |
mcp_pct counts any mcp/ artifact including ones API Evangelist derived from the provider OpenAPI; mcp_first_party_pct counts only servers the provider publishes. Prefer the latter.
- 1 Spectro Cloud 58.6
- 2 Hashnode 58.4
- 3 Modulate 55.7
- 4 Chronosphere 54.6
- 5 FriendliAI 53.8
- 6 Astronomer 53.4
- 7 Band AI 51.5
- 8 Gitar 49.5
- 9 TeamOhana 49
- 10 Citcon 47.9
- 1 Chronosphere 56.6
- 2 Appcues 42.7
- 3 Rill Data 38.5
- 4 FriendliAI 37.9
- 5 fabric 32.3
- 6 Krisp 31.5
- 7 Modulate 30.8
- 8 Fintary 30.7
- 9 Band AI 30
- 10 Hashnode 28.8
Coverage caveat. 75 of 80 scored members had under half their catalog-attributable points satisfied at all (catalog_earned / catalog_max < 0.5). They are INCLUDED in the mean above. A large share here means the cohort mean is partly a measurement of how far our enrichment reached, not only of how these providers publish.Generated from the catalog build of 3 October 2026, across 28834 providers, using the same computation served by the APIs.io cohort API. Briefs are published for rosters of 5 or more scored providers; below that a distribution is not meaningful.
Source (apis.yml)
Work with this as data
Every firm here is available over the APIs.io API and to AI agents over MCP.