Shanthi Shanmugam is the co-founder and CEO of Casap, a New York fintech that uses AI to automate payment disputes, chargebacks, and first-party fraud detection for banks, credit unions, and fintechs. A UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science graduate, she cut her teeth as a product manager at Facebook and spent roughly five years at Robinhood, where she launched the first crypto trading feature and later ran customer-care products. Watching back-office breakdowns erode consumer trust convinced her the dispute process was broken, so she reconnected with a former Facebook colleague, Saisi Peter, and started Casap in 2023. In August 2025 the company raised a $25M Series A led by Emergence Capital, bringing total funding to $33.5M.
Arpan Shah is a General Partner at Spark Capital in San Francisco, where he leads early-stage investments in AI, fintech, and data infrastructure. A Stanford-trained engineer from Kolkata, he was on the founding team at Robinhood, later founded Flannel (acquired by Plaid in 2021), and was a partner at Pear VC and a Sequoia Scout before joining Spark in November 2024.
Seth Berman co-founded Susa Ventures in 2013 and has since backed 10 unicorns across roughly 100 seed-stage investments, including Robinhood, Flexport, and Expanse. He brings an unusual background to venture capital - nearly a decade as VP of Strategic Marketing at Richemont Group (Cartier, Net-A-Porter, Montblanc) - giving him a luxury-brand consumer lens that shaped Susa's focus on distribution, compounding moats, and founder-market fit. He has since launched Kivu Ventures, a Series A/B fund targeting vertical AI, healthcare, and logistics, with investment partners including Frame.io co-founder Emery Wells and Pinterest co-founder Paul Sciarra.
Ilya Fushman is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where he invests in early and growth-stage companies reshaping enterprise software, infrastructure, financial services, and AI. Before VC, he was a senior product leader at Dropbox (employee #75) and a General Partner at Index Ventures. A trained physicist with a Stanford PhD and a Nature paper on quantum computing, Fushman brings rare scientific depth to the investment table - having backed transformative companies including Slack, Robinhood, Rippling, Harvey, and Loom.
Vlad Tenev is the Bulgarian-American co-founder and CEO of Robinhood Markets, the company that forced Wall Street to abolish trading commissions and put a brokerage in every pocket. Born in Varna, Bulgaria, and raised in Virginia after emigrating at age 5, Tenev studied mathematics at Stanford and UCLA before dropping his PhD to build trading software startups. In 2013, he and Baiju Bhatt launched Robinhood to give ordinary people the same tools as professional traders - for free. After navigating the GameStop firestorm, congressional testimony, a bruising post-IPO collapse, and two rounds of layoffs, Tenev rebuilt Robinhood into a diversified financial platform now worth nearly $100 billion and included in the S&P 500. He also co-founded Harmonic, an AI startup pursuing mathematical superintelligence, which reached a $1.45 billion valuation in 2025 after its AI model won a Gold Medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
Jack Raines is a writer, investor, and author who turned a $150,000 trading loss into a media career and a Penguin Random House book deal. He writes Young Money, a newsletter with 61,000+ subscribers covering behavioral finance, career philosophy, and what your twenties are actually for. He's now an investment associate at Slow Ventures, where he works on their $63M Creator Fund. Known for viral LinkedIn satire that got him reported to Columbia Business School as the 'Bacon Bandit of Hell's Kitchen,' he combines intellectual rigor with a refusal to take himself too seriously.
Andrew Reed is a Partner on Sequoia Capital's growth team - possibly the youngest junior partner in Sequoia's history when he joined at 23 from Goldman Sachs in 2014. Over a decade, he's built one of the most impressive growth-stage portfolios in venture capital, with board seats at Figma, Klarna, Bolt, Vanta, Strava, Warp, and Harmonic, and investments in Robinhood, ElevenLabs, Zapier, Phantom, and Sourcegraph. A childhood stutter made him a listener first, which turned into his greatest edge in founder assessment.
Josh Elman is a veteran Silicon Valley product leader and investor who helped grow Twitter nearly 10x, launched Facebook Connect, and backed foundational consumer products like Discord and Musical.ly at Greylock Partners. Currently Director of Product Management at Apple focused on App Store discovery, he is best known for his 'only metric that matters' framework - the idea that great products are defined by a core action users perform at a predictable frequency, not vanity metrics.