Erica Wenger raised $4.3 million from 130 backers to fund 'elephants, not unicorns.' The unusual part isn't the thesis - it's that she built a following first.
Raj Shekhar Singh is the Founder and General Partner of z21 Ventures, a community-first, operator-led early-stage VC firm investing at the pre-seed and seed stages across AI, fintech, enterprise software, and healthcare. An IIT Kharagpur BTech graduate with a PhD from UC Berkeley, Singh built his career from McKinsey to founding executive roles at Innovaccer (now a $3.5B healthtech unicorn) before launching z21 in 2022. The firm's $5M Fund I backed 26 startups and has already achieved two exits; Fund II closed its first $20M tranche with WestBridge Capital as anchor investor and is targeting $40M total.

Paige Finn Doherty is the founding partner of Behind Genius Ventures, a San Francisco-based pre-seed and seed VC firm managing ~$14M AUM across two funds. One of the youngest women in the world to start a venture fund (at age 22), she is also the author of 'Seed to Harvest: A Simple Explanation of Venture Capital,' host of the Seed to Harvest podcast, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Venture Capital (2022). A San Diego native and SDSU computer science graduate, she built her fund from a book she wrote to explain VC to her parents, using Twitter to raise her first $60K syndicate from 17 investors. She invests in 'technical storytellers' building 'clipboard companies' — verticalized AI applied to legacy industries.