early-stage-investor
(13)
Neil Cohen
Neil Cohen is a Manhattan-trained investment banker who co-founded American Rock Salt Company, the largest-producing salt mine in the United States, after the historic Retsof mine collapsed and flooded in the 1990s. As Founder, Co-CEO and Vice Chairman, he helped assemble the financing for the first successful new U.S. salt mine in over four decades, in Mount Morris, New York. In parallel he runs Emerald Development Managers LP, an early-stage venture capital firm he founded in 1994, backing science-heavy startups in diagnostics, digital pathology, nanotechnology and fuel cells. His career spans the deeply physical (20,000 tons of rock salt a day, mined 1,200 feet underground) and the deeply speculative (frontier-tech venture bets).
Michael Beaudoin
Michael Beaudoin is the CEO of Housecall Pro, the Denver-based vertical SaaS platform that helps plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs, cleaners and other home-service pros run their businesses from a phone. He joined the company as a board member in 2015 and stepped into the chief executive role in 2020, bringing two decades of experience leading and investing in consumer and home-services companies including HomeAdvisor, Einstein Bros. Bagels, and Waldo Photos, which he co-founded. Under his leadership Housecall Pro has scaled to serve tens of thousands of service businesses and roughly 1,400 employees, raising a $116.5M total war chest including a $65M Series D.
Rajiv Ramanan
Rajiv Ramanan is the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Spendflo, an AI-native procurement platform that helps fast-growing companies bring structure, visibility, and control to how they buy and manage software vendors. A Chennai native now based in San Francisco, Rajiv spent years at Freshworks building partner ecosystems and working with over 5,000 vendors before co-founding Spendflo in 2021 alongside Siddharth Sridharan and Ajay Vardhan. Under his GTM leadership, Spendflo has raised $15.9M in total funding, grown to 140 employees, and manages over $100M in SaaS expenditure for customers—delivering an average 23% reduction in software spend.
Carlotta Siniscalco
Carlotta 'Lotti' Siniscalco is a General Partner at Emergence Capital in San Francisco, the first woman partner in the firm's two-decade history. She backs early-stage enterprise software and fintech founders, with board roles at Federato, Whistic, and High Alpha. Milanese by birth, Wharton and Stanford by training, she sent cold emails to every AIFI member as a teenager to break into venture and hasn't slowed since.
Neeraj Gupta
Neeraj Gupta is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Cervin Ventures, a Palo Alto-based early-stage venture firm he co-founded with Preetish Nijhawan. Cervin has deployed capital across 50+ companies focusing on enterprise software, data & AI, cybersecurity, DevOps, and cloud - with over $335M in assets under management after closing a $162M flagship fund in September 2023. Before venture, Gupta ran two companies: Cymbal Corporation, a telecom consultancy he sold to Patni Computers, and Nexient, a digital experience consulting firm. He holds a MSEE from the University of Alabama, a BS from Punjab University, and is a Kauffman Fellow (Class 20). Outside the office he hikes, travels, and reads widely on Stoicism and public policy.
Rob Ness
Rob Ness is the General Partner of Asymmetry Ventures, a seed-stage VC firm backing companies that push humanity forward. After a career spanning consulting giants like Booz Allen Hamilton, Grant Thornton, and Capgemini, Ness built one of AngelList's largest syndicates — over 2,700 LPs, 200+ deals, and a 40%+ IRR over seven years as syndicate lead. His early bets on unicorns BillionToOne and Foresight Mental Health, and his leadership of Orbit Fab's $10M round, mark him as one of the seed-stage investors to watch. A US Army veteran and Harvard/Georgetown/UC Berkeley-educated economist, Ness is drawn to deep tech with a 'sci-fi flavor' — biotech, space infrastructure, quantum, and AI — that could change civilization.
Roman Beloded
Roman Beloded is a General Partner at Yellow Rocks!, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm investing in fintech, edtech, gaming, AI, and web3 globally. A serial IT entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience, he co-founded e-Legion, one of the world's top mobile app development companies, and FitStars.ru, a fitness video platform with 1.8M YouTube subscribers. His investment thesis centers on backing globally ambitious founders from underserved markets at the pre-seed and seed stages.
Aaron Epstein
Aaron Epstein is a General Partner at Y Combinator, the world's most prestigious startup accelerator. A serial founder who built his first software product in a college dorm room, he went on to co-found Creative Market (YC W10) — a design asset marketplace he grew to a 2014 Autodesk acquisition in under 16 months, then spun back out as an independent startup in 2017. At YC, he has reviewed over 8,000 applications, advised companies now collectively valued at $57 billion, and helped define how the accelerator thinks about marketplaces, business models, and pricing.
Lucian Todea
Lucian Todea is a Romanian-born serial entrepreneur and early-stage investor who built Soft32 from a $3/month passion project into one of the world's largest software distribution platforms, co-founded MultiversX (formerly Elrond) - a pioneering layer-1 blockchain - and now serves as Partner at 2048 Ventures in New York, where he has invested in 200+ companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Chainalysis, Suno, and Kraken. An Ironman finisher and relentless builder, Todea embodies the conviction that technology exists not for its own sake, but to improve and enrich human lives.
Anarghya Vardhana
Anarghya Vardhana is a venture partner at Maveron, the consumer-only VC firm co-founded by Howard Schultz, where she has spent nearly a decade backing iconic consumer brands in health, wellness, and social tech. A Stanford grad who published a math theorem at 17, she moved from Sandia National Labs nuclear research to Google international ops to the boardrooms of startups like Co-Star, Bend Health, and Alife. Forbes named her a 30 Under 30 in VC and their First Diversity Champion across the entire class. Simultaneously serving as Investor in Residence at Vanta, she is one of the few investors who credibly bridges deep technical rigor with consumer intuition - and who also runs trail marathons and dances Bharatanatyam.
Jawed Karim
Jawed Karim is the co-founder of YouTube and the man behind the internet's most historically significant 19 seconds of footage — 'Me at the zoo,' uploaded on April 23, 2005. Born in East Germany to a Bangladeshi father and German mother, Karim built YouTube's anti-fraud infrastructure at PayPal alongside Chad Hurley and Steve Chen before pivoting to change how humanity watches video. After Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, Karim quietly enrolled at Stanford, co-founded early-stage fund Y Ventures, and became one of Airbnb's first investors. He communicates publicly almost exclusively through the description box of his single YouTube video.
Ashton Kutcher
Ashton Kutcher is a venture capitalist, actor, and entrepreneur who transformed from sitcom star to one of Silicon Valley's most successful celebrity investors. As General Partner of Sound Ventures, he's built a $250M+ portfolio including Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, and Robinhood, with 35 exits and 7 unicorns. Beyond investing, he co-founded Thorn, a nonprofit using technology to combat child sexual exploitation, and has helped identify over 31,000 trafficking victims. From biochemical engineering student to Hollywood leading man to tech heavyweight, Kutcher represents a rare bridge between entertainment and venture capital.
Steve Jurvetson
Steve Jurvetson is a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of Future Ventures, best known for coining the term 'viral marketing,' backing Hotmail, SpaceX, and Tesla from their earliest days, and bringing a scientist's obsession to everything from model rockets to nanotechnology. After two decades at Draper Fisher Jurvetson managing over $6 billion, he launched Future Ventures in 2018 with a patient, 15-year fund structure focused on deep tech, AI, space, and synthetic biology. A triple Stanford alumnus who finished his EE degree in 2.5 years at the top of his class, Jurvetson is as likely to be found photographing rocket launches on his Flickr account as sitting on SpaceX's board.