We at Sequoia knew Sebastián Ramírez well long before we became the lead investor in his company, FastAPI Labs. In 2023 he was the inaugural recipient of our Open Source Fellowship.

We started the fellowship because we recognized that open source is the lifeblood of software, and that open source contributors around the world make commercial software better and more reliable. We wanted our first fellowship recipient to be someone who already had a huge impact on the open source ecosystem. 

Sebastián perfectly fit that bill! He is the creator of FastAPI, the wildly popular open-source Python framework used everywhere from Fortune Global 500 corporations such as BMW, American Express and Roche, to academia, to nonprofits such as NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute and the Red Cross. At the start of the fellowship, Sebastián was overflowing with ideas to improve on what he’d built—and we are proud to have supported his work in the years since. 

Starting a company came up several times in our many conversations with him. In a sense, Sebastián has been an entrepreneur his entire life, having taken the road less traveled many times before. And he has plenty of the grit and perseverance a founder needs. Building a new business today may be a fad for many engineering and business graduates, but Sebastián was intentional about what his company would do. 

FastAPI the open-source framework was born from Sebastián’s vision for solving a complicated problem—building an API in Python. FastAPI Labs the company was born from his frustration with how difficult it is to deploy an app. It turns out that the software development lifecycle is an exercise of moving the cheese: you remove one bottleneck, only to discover the next. And Sebastián has never been someone to shy away from removing bottlenecks or solving gnarly problems. That’s why he and his team are building FastAPI Cloud: a service that enables developers to seamlessly deploy apps to the cloud. 

Given our long relationship with and belief in Sebastián, it’s only natural that we’re leading the seed round in FastAPI Labs, and we are excited to continue to support him and his team.