Nmachi Jidenma is Head of Scouts & Partnerships at Sequoia Capital. In this role, she leads partnerships as well as Sequoia’s proprietary Scouts initiative where founders and influential affiliates invest in pre-seed and seed stage companies on Sequoia’s behalf. Scout investments include Stripe, Uber, Thumbtack and Guardant Health.
Prior to Sequoia Capital, Nmachi led global strategy and business development at WhatsApp Inc, the world’s leader in mobile messaging with over 2 billion monthly users.
In this role, she led WhatsApp’s strategy and business development efforts to drive monetisation and build an ecosystem of business messaging partners worldwide.
She also led strategic alliances with global brands as well as partnerships with governments, nonprofits and United Nations agencies such as the World Health Organisation and UNICEF to drive WhatsApp’s COVID-19 vaccine response efforts to help vaccinate the world.
These efforts positively impacted the lives of millions of people worldwide. She also led global teams on the rollout of payments on WhatsApp as well as early WhatsApp Business monetisation strategy initiatives spanning business model, pricing, infrastructure alliances and landscape assessments to help inform its M&A strategy.
She previously led global strategic partnerships at Facebook with financial services industry leaders such as PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Adyen and PayU (Naspers) and drove adoption of Facebook payments products globally.
Prior to Facebook, Nmachi drove Global Business Development at PayPal for its billion dollar mobile disruptors portfolio where she launched the company into new verticals such as mobile marketplaces, transit and cryptocurrencies through partnerships with innovative startups and companies.
Nmachi serves as a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Goddy Jidenma Foundation – a philanthropic organisation that promotes leadership, socio-economic empowerment and public service in Africa.
She is a Limited Partner at How Women Invest, an early stage venture capital firm and is a member of the Board of Directors of the CCHub Investment Company.
She is a frequent speaker, panelist and mentor at international conferences and panels with appearances at Fortune Conferences, Techonomy, Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Money2020 and so on.
Her work/writing has been featured in a wide variety of publications such as CNN, Reuters and Voice of America. She holds a Master’s in Applied Economics from Cornell University.
From idea to IPO and beyond, the Sequoia team helps a small number of daring founders build legendary companies. They spur them to push the boundaries of what’s possible. In partnering with Sequoia, companies benefit from their unmatched network and the lessons they have learnt over 45 years.
