
Tashinga Musiyazviriyo is the Founder and CEO of The Singular, a Johannesburg-based digital transformation company building purpose-driven IoT, AI, and private 5G network solutions across industries including mining, telecommunications, manufacturing, smart cities, and healthcare. With a career forged inside Ericsson's core network engineering teams and a deep grounding in mobile network design and performance, Tashinga brings both technical precision and entrepreneurial drive to the challenge of connecting Africa's industries to the future.
Ilana Stern is a General Partner at Peterson Ventures, a seed-stage venture firm based in Salt Lake City, Utah. A Stanford GSB alumna and former founder, she built and sold Weddington Way - a direct-to-consumer bridal fashion platform - to Gap Inc. in 2016 before joining Peterson Ventures in 2019 as its first San Francisco-based partner. She invests primarily in early-stage consumer, enterprise, and healthcare technology companies, while also lecturing at Stanford GSB and writing a Substack newsletter called 'View from the Bottom.'
Jake Saper is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, the San Francisco-based venture firm that backed Zoom, Salesforce, and Veeva before the rest of the world caught on. Over a decade at Emergence, he has become one of the loudest and most credible voices on AI-native services — companies that combine human expertise with AI to displace the $200B consulting industry. His 2024 essay 'The Death of Deloitte' earned him a cease-and-desist from Deloitte and a loyal readership of founders rebuilding professional services from scratch. A Yale and Stanford-trained operator-turned-investor, he grew up in Austin watching serial-entrepreneur parents build companies, started his own career selling rocks door-to-door from a Radio Flyer wagon, and today holds board seats at category-defining enterprise companies while maintaining a side career as a self-described 'mediocre guitar player.'
Kesha Cash is the Founder and General Partner of Impact America Fund, the largest VC firm in America run entirely by a Black woman. Based in Oakland, California, she manages $65 million across two funds, backing technology-enabled startups that serve low-to-moderate income and overlooked communities. Her portfolio includes Esusu (a fintech unicorn), Mayvenn, SoLo Funds, and CareAcademy. A former Wall Street analyst who grew up on a farm in South Carolina and was the first in her family to attend college, Cash draws on lived experience of economic inequality to identify billion-dollar opportunities that traditional investors routinely miss.
Tammie Siew is a General Partner and Co-Founder at Pebblebed, a San Francisco-based deep tech venture capital firm focused on foundational infrastructure—AI simulation engines, robot operating systems, developer platforms, and formal verification systems. A Cornell-educated economist and literature scholar who spent years investing at Sequoia Capital Singapore before co-founding a healthcare startup, she brings a rare operator-investor lens to backing the infrastructure layer of next-generation technology. Pebblebed's Fund II closed at $125M in 2024, with roughly 35 investments backing companies like Augment Code, OpenMind, Zeromatter, Lemurian Labs, and Logical Intelligence.
Thomas Mawhinney is a General Partner at Icon Ventures, a Palo Alto-based early-stage venture capital firm where he has invested since 2003. With over 30 years in the technology industry spanning entrepreneurship and venture capital, he combines hands-on operating experience — having co-founded and run a venture-backed software company — with deep investing expertise that has produced exits to Microsoft, Cisco, HP, Twilio, Experian, and more. His current focus spans AI-native companies, digital health, enterprise software, and cybersecurity, with board seats at companies including Teladoc Health, BILL (Bill.com), Maven Clinic, Synack, and Nomad Health.
Kanav Hasija is Co-Founder and CEO of MeltPlan, an AI-native preconstruction planning platform backed by Bessemer Venture Partners. A serial entrepreneur who co-built Innovaccer into a $3.2B healthcare data unicorn, he now applies the same data-platform playbook to construction — where fragmented planning and late-stage surprises cost billions annually. MeltPlan's tools (Melt Code, Melt Takeoff) bring AI-powered code compliance and quantity estimation to architects, contractors, and owners before the first shovel breaks ground.