Alejandro Guerrero is the Co-Founder and General Partner of Act One Ventures, a Los Angeles micro-VC firm that backs pre-seed and seed companies across vertical SaaS, fintech, compliance, and AI-native enterprise software. A first-generation Mexican-American and former two-time founder, he authored the Diversity Rider, a clause now adopted by hundreds of funds that obligates lead investors to make space on cap tables for underrepresented co-investors. Act One closed a $73M Fund III in 2024 - roughly 3x its prior fund.
Amrit Rao is a General Partner at Village Global, the early-stage venture firm backed by Reid Hoffman, Jeff Bezos and a network of luminary LPs. A Stanford-trained biologist turned Wall Street investor turned advanced-manufacturing founder, he writes pre-seed and seed checks across tech and consumer, drawing on a dozen years of public-market investing and the bruises he collected building a furniture startup.
Antonio Key is Co-Founder and General Partner of Sunset Ventures, a pre-seed fund based in Los Angeles and San Francisco that has backed more than 70 early-stage companies, including Ready Player Me, Yuga Labs, Wonder Dynamics, BlocPower, and Flow Carbon. Before Sunset, he was Director of Investments at Samsung Next and an M&A banker at Bank of America Merrill Lynch who worked on roughly $26B in deals. He's a Kauffman Fellow (Class 28), Wharton MBA, and Stanford grad.
Augustin Sayer is co-founder and General Partner at OVNI Capital, a Paris- and San Francisco-based seed fund backing European deep-tech founders building global companies. Before OVNI, he invested 20+ early-stage rounds at Newfund (including FairMoney and Umiami), ran a retail company in Mexico, and started his finance career at Lazard Frères M&A in New York.
Chad Byers is co-founder and General Partner at Susa Ventures, a San Francisco seed-stage firm he started in 2013 with Leo Polovets and Seth Berman. He wrote one of the first institutional checks into Robinhood at age 26 - a $250k bet that grew past $400M - and has led Susa into Flexport, Andela, Newfront, Mux, Stord and Viz. In March 2025, Susa closed its fifth fund at $175M. He focuses on marketplaces, fintech, healthcare and logistics, and describes himself as a quiet introvert in a loud business.
Dana Oshiro is General Partner at Heavybit, San Francisco's specialist fund for developer-first and cloud infrastructure startups. She joined in 2014 as the firm's original Operating Partner and has since helped launch 60+ developer products, led early positioning for companies like Snyk, LaunchDarkly, Netlify, CircleCI, and PagerDuty, and co-founded the DevGuild conference series. Before tech, she worked in public health and political strategy in Canada, including campaigns to establish North America's first safe injection site. Her investment sweet spot is $1.5M at pre-seed to Series A, backing technical founders building category-defining enterprise infrastructure.
Eric Norman is a General Partner at Pioneer Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that pools resources from 500+ Y Combinator alumni to back top-performing YC startups. A former hardware founder himself - he built and led Cinder Precision Cooker through Y Combinator - Norman brings firsthand operator experience to his investing, with recent portfolio activity in AI identity, healthcare AI, and enterprise tooling.
Hannah Chelkowski is Co-Founder and General Partner at Blank Ventures, a $65M specialist fund investing at the intersection of fintech and commerce. A native Londoner now based in San Francisco, she brings an unusual backstory to venture - energy risk modeling at Total S.A. led to startup investing at Initialized Capital and Inovia Capital before she launched her own firm in 2022. Named to Business Insider's 71 Rising-Star VCs in 2022, she runs a deliberately concentrated portfolio with an LP base architected as a go-to-market asset: C-suite executives from major financial institutions, billion-dollar startups, and global family offices who become direct distribution channels for her portfolio companies.
Joe Eandi is a General Partner and Co-Founder of Cyber Mentor Fund, a mentorship-driven early-stage venture fund exclusively focused on cybersecurity startups. A former attorney turned tech executive turned founder turned investor, Eandi brings an unusually wide arc to his work: he started as a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini, served as General Counsel at Inktomi through its Yahoo acquisition, spent seven years as SVP and GM at LiveOps, founded and ran BrightPoint Security (acquired by ServiceNow in 2016), and then co-founded Cyber Mentor Fund in 2018 alongside Tim Eades. CMF deploys $100K-$5M from pre-seed through Series A into cybersecurity startups, with over 35 portfolio companies, three unicorns, and four successful exits including Okera (Databricks), Revelstoke (Arctic Wolf), Message Control (Mimecast), and LeakSignal (F5).
John Gleeson is the Founder and General Partner of Success Venture Partners, a $10M seed-stage venture firm in San Francisco laser-focused on the post-sales customer success space. A Canadian-born operator who scaled customer success from $1M to $300M+ ARR at KeepTruckin (now Motive), John built the world's largest Customer Success Meetup communities in San Francisco and New York before turning his practitioner network into a differentiated LP base of over 87 Chief Customer Officers from companies like Slack, GitHub, Braze, and Notion. He bets on founders who are obsessively close to their customers, treating customer success not as a support function but as the primary engine of enterprise value.
Kate McAndrew is the Co-Founder and General Partner of Baukunst, a San Francisco-based venture firm managing a $100M inaugural fund that backs creative technologists at the intersection of technology and design. With over a decade of pre-seed investing experience - including nearly eight years at Bolt where she was the first employee and rose to Partner - she has invested in 100+ companies and leads every round she enters, targeting 15%+ ownership at pre-seed. She is also the founder of Women in Hardware, the largest network for technical women in the hardware ecosystem, and co-author of 'The Goddess Guide to Branding.'
Matt Lee is the Founder and General Partner of Progression Fund, a pre-seed and seed-stage consumer technology VC firm co-founded with alumni from musical.ly and TikTok. Based in Oakland, California, he backs visionary founders building AI-native products for everyday consumers and prosumers, with a particular thesis around generational behavior shifts - specifically Gen Z and Gen Alpha. His portfolio spans consumer tech, gaming, entertainment, social platforms, live streaming commerce, and digital health, with notable investments including Perplexity AI and Dapper Labs. He brings a global perspective from prior roles at ChinaRock Capital Management, Pereg Ventures, and engineering and consulting stints at Macquarie Group and Capco.
Matt Rappaport is General Partner at Future Frontier Capital, a pre-seed frontier technology VC fund based in Berkeley, California. A former professional musician who studied West African Sabar drumming in Senegal, Rappaport brings an unconventional lens to deep tech investing - 20+ years of IP strategy expertise, a faculty role at UC Berkeley's Fung Institute, and a data-driven methodology using patent landscape analytics to identify emerging sectors before mainstream adoption. He co-founded FFC with longtime partner Mark Garner in late 2023, building a portfolio of 100+ early-stage startups across AI, biotech, robotics, climate, and advanced materials - achieving nearly 11X TVPI on previous investments.
Maxine Minter is Australia's first solo female General Partner at a venture capital fund, and the Founder & GP of Co Ventures - a $5M pre-seed fund dedicated to backing software-led companies with at least one Australian founder building for global scale. Based in San Francisco, she started her career as a tech lawyer, pivoted into startup founding and operating, and began angel investing with $2,500 cheques before raising her own fund. She co-hosts the 'First Cheque' podcast with Cheryl Mack, champions a 'belief capital' philosophy, and has built a portfolio with over 50% women founders.
Mohan Iyer is a General Partner at SOSV's IndieBio SF, the world's leading biotech accelerator. With 25+ years operating life science startups across Genentech, Tethys Bioscience, Second Genome, and Pendulum Therapeutics, he brings rare bench-to-boardroom experience to pre-seed biotech founders. Trained as a chemical and biomedical engineer before earning his MBA from Yale, Iyer has spent his career translating disruptive biology into products the world actually needs — and now bets on founders doing the same.
Raj Sandhu is a General Partner at Great Oaks Venture Capital, one of the most active seed-stage investors in the United States with a portfolio spanning 345+ companies and 14 unicorns. Armed with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a double-major BS in Computer Science and Economics from Yale, Sandhu brings a rare blend of technical depth and financial acumen to early-stage investing. Over more than two decades, he has backed companies from pre-seed through Series A with check sizes ranging from $50K to $500K, focusing on enterprise software, SaaS, marketplaces, healthcare, and fintech. Before joining Great Oaks, he managed $2 billion in assets at the Chatterjee-Soros Group, led technology banking at Cowen & Co., and co-founded Modulus Video — a video compression company acquired by Motorola in 2007. His portfolio includes breakout names like Hinge, Peek, Acorns, Allbirds, Bolt, Flatiron Health, and Ibotta.
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.
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.
Sathya Nellore Sampat is the General Partner and co-founder of BoldCap, a pre-seed and seed-stage venture fund backing AI-native B2B startups built by Indian-origin founders for global markets. An engineer by training and entrepreneur at heart, Sampat built and scaled a data modernization startup to $3M in revenue before pivoting to venture capital in 2021. At BoldCap, he writes $250K-$1M checks into companies in Data/AI, developer infrastructure, vertical SaaS, and cybersecurity - and goes far beyond capital with Bracket, a proprietary GTM network connecting Indian founders to North American and European revenue leaders.
J. Skyler (Sky) Fernandes is the Founder and General Partner of VU Venture Partners, a global venture capital fund spanning San Francisco, Hong Kong, Munich, and São Paulo, and the Co-Founder & CEO of Venture University, widely considered the world's leading investor accelerator. A Powerlist 100 VC, Fernandes has assembled a portfolio of 150+ investments including early positions in SpaceX, OpenAI, Meta (Facebook), Uber, Palantir, and Neuralink - with 25+ unicorns and 20+ multi-billion dollar exits. Before VU, he founded Simon Venture Group, the VC arm of Simon Property Group (S&P 100), which CB Insights ranked a top 5 retail investor alongside GV, Intel Capital, and Comcast Ventures. He graduated summa cum laude from NYU and studied Physics and Foreign Policy at Harvard. Beyond capital, Fernandes gave the first TED Talk on venture capital, created the #1 Startup Pitch Deck template (700,000+ views), and co-created 'The Next Big Thing' board game on entrepreneurship with his wife Jenna.
Tyler Mincey is Co-Founder and General Partner at Baukunst, a San Francisco-based pre-seed venture firm that raised a $100 million debut fund in 2022 - the largest debut pre-seed fund ever raised. A Princeton-trained mechanical engineer who helped ship the first iPhone and 150+ million Apple devices, Mincey brings rare hardware-to-venture credibility: he co-founded a car-tech startup (Pearl Automation), pioneered an embedded engineering team inside Bolt VC, and now leads Baukunst's bet that the next generation of breakthrough companies will be built at the intersection of technology and design.
Vincent Diallo is a French-born, trilingual (French, English, Mandarin) venture capitalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area who brings a rare tri-continental lens to consumer and commerce investing. He is General Partner at Progression, a TikTok-alumni-led fund backing AI-native consumer products, and founder and Managing Partner of Interlace Ventures, a $14M debut fund dedicated to commerce technology. Before moving into venture, he served as CFO of Sinodis in Shanghai — scaling the largest independent Western food distributor in China from $50M to $200M in revenue before its exit — and spent seven years at Deloitte across Paris and Shanghai auditing global giants including LVMH, WPP, and Pernod Ricard. He is also co-founder of Bleu Capital, a transatlantic climate-focused family office.
Will Robbins is a General Partner at Contrary, the San Francisco-based venture firm that built a national network of 100+ student venture partners across 50+ universities to source and back the most talented early-stage founders in the US and India. Joining in 2017 as an early team member, Robbins helped scale the firm from a $2M experiment into a fund managing hundreds of millions in AUM, with a portfolio spanning unicorns like Ramp, Rippling, Zepto, and Hallow. A University of Illinois CS alumnus who left Stanford to go all-in on venture, he writes prolifically on generalist investing, geopolitical tech themes, and the architecture of the modern startup ecosystem.
Lauren Roberts is an Associate at Forum Ventures in New York, where she evaluates hundreds of pre-seed B2B SaaS startups each year and coaches founders on market positioning, storytelling, and early traction. A University of Oklahoma alumna who co-founded her school's first student-run venture fund, she came to VC through a transformative summer in Tulsa during the centennial of the Greenwood Race Massacre - an experience that turned a pre-law finance student into one of the more distinctive voices on inclusive investing in early-stage tech.
Dexter Ligot-Gordon is a California-born Filipino-American entrepreneur and Co-founder and CEO of Swarm, a GenAI consulting and implementation firm helping enterprises move AI projects from proof-of-concept to production. Before Swarm, he co-founded Kalibrr - the first Southeast Asian startup accepted into Y Combinator (W13) - and spent nearly a decade in public policy including serving as a UC Berkeley Student Regent. Swarm raised a $1.1M pre-seed round in November 2023 from Hustle Fund and Plug and Play.
Samira Behrouzan is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on Marketing and Games, and the force behind a16z speedrun - a pre-seed accelerator that has deployed over $180 million to 150+ startups at the intersection of games and technology. Before joining a16z, she led marketing at 100 Thieves and drove 20+ brand partnerships for Riot Games' Emmy-nominated Arcane series, including boundary-pushing collaborations like bringing ZEDD into VALORANT. A lifelong gamer who grew up on Sega Saturn and N64, she holds an Executive MBA from the IE Brown program and is a vocal advocate for women and underrepresented communities in gaming.
Troy Kirwin is an Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Cohort Lead for a16z speedrun, the firm's pre-seed accelerator program. A native New Yorker now based in San Francisco, he focuses on B2B AI and creative tech - including next-gen storytelling and design tools, marketing technology, 3D simulations, and vertical AI agents. Before a16z, he spent roughly 4.5 years as a Senior Manager at Unity Technologies, where he orchestrated over 20 acquisitions including Parsec and IronSource. He started his career as an investment banking analyst at Jefferies covering media and tech clients. His portfolio includes K-ID, Hedra, Backflip, Nunu.ai, and a dozen more.
Tony Xia is a computer vision engineer turned venture scout and startup founder who built his technical chops at DJI, AutoX, and Arraiy (acquired by Matterport) before co-founding Crema Social - a video-call-meets-food-delivery international dating platform that amassed over 1 million signups in 8 months. After graduating from a16z speedrun's Cohort 003, he became a Scout for a16z speedrun, backing pre-seed founders with $10K checks and a direct path into one of Silicon Valley's most competitive accelerators.
John Eng is the Funding Ecosystem Partner at Right Side Capital Management, a San Francisco-based VC firm that has deployed $250M+ across 8 funds into 2,200+ early-stage B2B startups since 2012. With 25 years in B2B marketing and partnerships leadership at Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Parallels - plus CMO stints at Tradeshift, Remix, NewVoiceMedia, and Swiftly - Eng brings rare operator-investor credibility to RSCM's sprawling portfolio. He writes $50K-$200K checks into pre-seed B2B startups with real traction, helping founders navigate fundraising and growth through RSCM's operating platform.
Kiley Grimes is the Head of Ecosystem at Redbud VC, the early-stage venture fund co-founded by the founders of EquipmentShare, based in Columbia, Missouri. A 2025 Mizzou BSBA graduate, she built Soundcheck - a 24/7 on-demand music practice studio in Columbia's North Village Arts District - from a $6,500 seed check to profitability in under a year, winning $10,000 at Entrepreneur Quest along the way. Equal parts operator and community builder, she now channels that founder instinct into growing Redbud's startup ecosystem across the Heartland.