In September 2018, Crivello landed in Singapore as Director of Strategic Growth for Prive Technologies, a wealth management technology firm. She was 22. Most people her age were still figuring out what an LP is. She was building relationships across Southeast Asia's financial services ecosystem, learning how capital moved across borders, and watching the Singapore startup scene from the inside.
She also tried building her own startup, LIMIT, during this period. She consulted on business development strategy for other founders. She screened pitch decks until she could smell a weak deck at 10 paces. All of it was practice for what came next.
In November 2019, she joined Draper Startup House as Head of Ventures. The company was, at that point, an entrepreneur-focused co-living and coworking concept with serious momentum and a growing global network. Then, in March 2020, she and co-founder Vikram Bharati launched DSH Ventures as a standalone fund — just as the world went into lockdown.
"I reflected to understand lessons learned: balancing optimistic vs. realistic expectations, relying on one another as if our lives/success depended on it — because it did, and overall realigning our goals back to why we started in the first place — to empower individuals to become and grow as entrepreneurs."
- Giulianna Crivello, on launching during the pandemic
The timing was brutal on paper. In practice, the founders who kept building through a global pandemic were, by definition, the ones worth betting on. Crivello and Bharati invested in 21 companies across 14 countries in that first year. The portfolio now includes companies across the United States, Singapore, India, and eight or more additional markets.
One of those early bets was Headquarters, a startup that Gnosis acquired in May 2025 for $15 million. Another is VirtualSpeech, a platform for public speaking training using virtual reality. Another is Ferne Health, working at the intersection of femtech and accessibility. The portfolio is intentionally broad in geography and industry, which is how DSH Ventures operates — pre-seed, innovation-based, global by design.
What Draper Startup House brings to this equation is structural. Tim Draper, the legendary investor behind companies including Skype, Hotmail, Tesla, and SpaceX, is a Limited Partner. The fund is a member of the Draper Venture Network, which spans 24 funds worldwide. When a founder gets a check from DSH Ventures, they are not just getting capital. They are getting introduced to a network that stretches across five continents, 25 embassies, and a mission — one million entrepreneurs by 2030 — that is not metaphorical.
Crivello has personally facilitated more than 215 investor introductions since the fund's formation. That is the number that matters most. A fund's returns are determined by its portfolio companies' outcomes. Its reach, though, is measured by how many founders it connected to the right room at the right moment. 215 times, she was the person who made that call.
