Sruthi Sivanandan - Associate, Pre-Seed Venture Capital
Before a B2B startup has a term sheet, a co-founder, or even a deck that makes sense - someone has to make the introduction. In San Francisco, that someone is increasingly Sruthi Sivanandan.
Sruthi Sivanandan joined Forum Ventures as Associate at a specific inflection point: the firm was returning to San Francisco, a city it had previously stepped back from, with a mandate to rebuild community from scratch. They picked her to do it. Not a marketing hire. Not a community manager. An Associate - someone expected to think in investments and act in relationships simultaneously.
That's not an easy brief. Early-stage venture is a business of credibility before capital. A founder who doesn't trust your judgment won't take your check, and a check won't arrive if the founder didn't come to your event last month. Sruthi understood this. She started with coffee. Literally.
The SF Coffee Club - co-hosted with 11 Tribes Ventures' Kristina Chapple - is deliberately, almost aggressively low-key: a "casual and stress-free meetup" for B2B SaaS founders, operators, and investors. No agenda slides. No panel speakers. No name-tag hierarchies. Just founders finding each other, and finding Forum.
"We're passionate about building connections in the early-stage ecosystem."- Sruthi Sivanandan, Forum Ventures
Since joining Luma in January 2025, she has hosted over 20 events and attended 45 more. Those are not vanity numbers. In a city that runs on warm intros and trusted networks, 20 events in a few months means she's already the person who knows who you need to meet.
NYC Fintech Women noticed. They named her to their 2025 Inspiring FinTech Females list as a "Network Builder." She reportedly finds the category amusing - she's been known to say she dislikes being called a networker. The list doesn't care. Neither does the ecosystem she's building.
At UC Davis, most students pick one major and spend four years wishing they'd picked a different one. Sruthi Sivanandan picked three: Economics, Bioinformatics, and Statistics. It's a combination that should produce someone who works at a hedge fund or designs clinical trials. Instead, it produced someone who ended up building community for a venture capital firm backing AI and B2B software startups in San Francisco.
The logic, in retrospect, is completely obvious. Economics teaches you that markets are made by people with asymmetric information. Bioinformatics teaches you that complex systems produce signals buried in noise. Statistics teaches you not to believe the signal until you've checked the noise three times. That's basically a job description for a pre-seed investor.
After Davis, she went to IBM. Then BlackRock. These are not the resume entries of someone who already had "VC" circled as the destination. They're the resume entries of someone building a toolkit - understanding how large institutions think, how financial data moves, what rigor looks like when the stakes are real. At BlackRock, billions move on analysis. The margin for sloppy thinking is negative.
Feedzai was the pivot. The San Francisco-based AI platform uses machine learning to detect fraud in financial transactions - not the abstract ML of a research lab, but the applied kind where a model failing costs banks real money in real time. Her role in Product Analytics and Operations put her at the intersection of product logic and operational execution: what is the product actually doing, and is the machine around it running right?
It also gave her something that most analysts who move into venture lack: proximity to founders building hard things under real pressure. Feedzai wasn't a spreadsheet company. It was a company solving for adversarial conditions - fraud is, by definition, adaptive. She saw what it looks like when a technical team ships against a moving target.
Before a startup has a term sheet, a co-founder, or a deck that makes sense - someone has to make the introduction. In San Francisco, that's increasingly Sruthi Sivanandan.- YesPress
Forum Ventures brought her in as that story began again in San Francisco. The firm - founded in 2014, known as the leading pre-seed fund and accelerator for B2B SaaS - had previously operated more heavily in New York. The decision to return to San Francisco came with a new Managing Director, Deirdre Clute, and a mandate to build the kind of West Coast presence that founders actually feel.
Sruthi is the person on the ground making that presence tangible. Her Coffee Club events - held on weekday mornings, deliberately stripped of the performative energy that makes most startup events feel like job fairs - have become a real fixture. The format is the message: Forum shows up for you before you've raised anything worth showing up for.
She's also doing the analytical work. Her name appears in the acknowledgments of Forum's published research on vertical AI sales tools - specifically credited with providing "competitive landscape research and support." This is the less-glamorous side of early-stage investing: reading the market, mapping the players, asking why the 12th quoting software startup might succeed where the previous 11 didn't. That kind of work doesn't show up on TechCrunch. It shows up in the quality of the bets.
NYC Fintech Women put her on the 2025 Inspiring FinTech Females list in the "Network Builder" category. It's a label that reportedly makes her laugh - she's been clear that she doesn't particularly embrace the "networker" identity. The irony is structural: the people who are best at building real community are usually the ones most allergic to being called networkers. They're not collecting contacts. They're building something.
What she's building is a corner of San Francisco's pre-seed ecosystem where B2B SaaS founders can find each other, find Forum, and start something. The thesis is simple: the best time to know an investor is before you need one. The best time to build community is before it's strategic.
She's already in the room before it fills up. That's exactly where she wants to be.
Recognized in the "Network Builder" category - an acknowledgment of Sruthi's work building bridges between founders, investors, and operators in the early-stage B2B ecosystem. She reportedly finds the label ironic: she's spent more time creating genuine community than collecting contacts. The recognition stands regardless.
Anchors Forum Ventures' West Coast presence in SF - organized 20+ B2B SaaS founder events since early 2025 alongside new MD Deirdre Clute.
Co-hosts casual, stress-free meetups for early-stage B2B founders and funders with 11 Tribes Ventures. Deliberately anti-performative by design.
Credited for competitive landscape research on vertical AI sales tools in Forum's publicly published thesis on industrial digitization.
Recognized by NYC Fintech Women in the Network Builder category for contributions to the early-stage fintech and startup community.
Built her toolkit across IBM, BlackRock, and Feedzai before VC - bringing analytical rigor from large-scale finance and applied AI to pre-seed investing.
UC Davis triple major: Economics, Bioinformatics, and Statistics - an unusual academic base that maps directly to pattern-recognition and market analysis.
Her academic triple major - Economics, Bioinformatics, and Statistics at UC Davis - is an unusual combination that almost perfectly describes the analytical toolkit for a pre-seed investor evaluating AI and B2B SaaS markets.
She worked at Feedzai - an AI-powered fraud detection platform - before entering venture. That means she's seen applied machine learning under adversarial, high-stakes conditions before evaluating it as an investment thesis.
NYC Fintech Women put her on their 2025 Inspiring FinTech Females list as a "Network Builder." She reportedly finds that label amusing - she describes herself as genuinely disliking the networker identity.
The Coffee Club events she co-hosts are specifically designed to be "casual and stress-free" - a deliberate signal in a startup culture full of performative, hierarchy-heavy networking events that rarely produce real connections.
Forum Ventures
The leading pre-seed fund, accelerator and AI venture studio for B2B SaaS startups - founded 2014. Sruthi is part of the team building Forum's West Coast community in San Francisco alongside Managing Director Deirdre Clute.