Clipbook is an AI-native platform for communications and corporate affairs teams. It monitors over one million media and policy sources - press, broadcast, podcasts, social, regulatory filings - and uses agentic AI to surface what actually matters, in real time. Founded in 2023 by ex-BCG consultant Adam Joseph, Clipbook bootstrapped to seven figures in ARR before raising a $3.3M seed round co-led by Mark Cuban, Commonweal Ventures, and Carpenter Capital in late 2025.
Cube is an AI-powered marketing automation platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California, that deploys autonomous AI agents to manage paid ads, SEO, social media, email marketing, and online reputation management from a single dashboard. Founded by IIT and Stanford alumni, the company trains its AI on historical ad-spend data to deliver real-time campaign optimization across Google, Meta, TikTok, Amazon, and more - promising businesses a full marketing team's output without the headcount.
Joaquin Olmedo is the co-founder and CEO of Filadd (YC S21), a Córdoba-born edtech platform helping students across Latin America get into — and through — university. What began in 2016 as an online prep course for Argentine university entrance exams has grown into a four-country operation serving over 25,000 students annually, with 90% year-over-year growth and recognition as one of Holon IQ's 100 Leading LatAm EdTechs. An industrial engineer by training, Olmedo applied to Y Combinator on a Mexican investor's offhand suggestion and was accepted — with metrics that caught the partners' attention immediately.
Kathleen Forte is an Investor Relations Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied venture capital firms. With over two decades of experience across investor relations, business development, and fundraising, she has held senior roles at Lightspeed Venture Partners, SVB Financial Group, ADM Capital, and Clearwater Capital Partners. Known for her deep expertise in LP relationships and fund management, Forte joined Sequoia in July 2022, bringing a rare blend of financial acumen and relationship-driven dealmaking to one of Silicon Valley's most prestigious platforms.
Neiman Mathew is a Partner at Greylock, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where he focuses on early-stage founders building the next generation AI stack. He skipped college to pursue technology, spending years at Hex Labs applying AI to materials discovery and at Schmidt Futures funding ambitious AI-for-science research before joining Amplify Partners and then Greylock. Known for engaging founders before they even have a business idea, Mathew brings a rare combination of deep scientific intuition and investor pattern-recognition to the earliest and most uncertain bets in AI.
Ernest Addison is a Senior Associate at Boldstart Ventures, one of the premier enterprise-focused seed-stage VC firms, where he backs founders at the earliest inflection point. With a career that spans Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America's Global Industrials investment banking desk, and private equity at Audax Group, Ernest brings a rare mix of Wall Street rigor and startup-native intuition to enterprise infrastructure, security, developer tools, and SaaS. Originally from Washington, D.C. and a UVA McIntire alum, he joined Boldstart in 2021 and has since become a fixture in the firm's mission to be the first check into ambitious technical founders.
Herman Yang is the CEO and co-founder of Upscale AI, an AI-native platform that lets e-commerce brands create, run, and optimize performance TV ads on streaming channels. A Stanford CS grad with an MBA from Harvard Business School, Yang spent over a decade reshaping mobile advertising at AdMob (acquired by Google) and MoPub (acquired by Twitter, then AppLovin), before stints at Facet Data, Chatgrid, and Moloco. In May 2025, he emerged from stealth with $5.5M in seed funding - backed by Nvidia Ventures, M12, Eniac, and others - to democratize what was once a $100K-minimum medium: streaming TV ads, rebuilt from scratch for performance marketers.
Monica Woo is a Partner at 2048 Ventures, a $67M seed-stage VC fund in New York, where she backs early-stage companies in AI, cybersecurity, edtech, and e-commerce. A Wharton MBA with a career spanning four continents, she has held CMO and president-level roles at 1-800-Flowers.com, Bacardi, Diageo, Nutrisystem, Sears, FreshDirect, and Mozido - generating over $5 billion in incremental revenue across her career. As founder of WooWorks, she channels that operator experience into advising and investing in the next wave of emerging tech companies.
Natalie Ledbetter is a 3x startup People Ops executive, TEDx speaker, and former Operating Partner & Head of People at Boldstart Ventures who scaled Stash from 27 to 350 employees in 2.5 years. A self-described 'third culture kid' who grew up attending school in Jakarta, Indonesia alongside students from 90 countries, she now runs Ledbetter Global Advisory, offering embedded fractional people operations leadership to Series A-B companies. She has partnered with 100+ founders across the startup ecosystem, blending strategic executive thinking with hands-on execution to build high-performance, psychologically safe teams.
Rachel Soper Sanders is a Venture Partner at 2048 Ventures and the CEO and co-founder of Rootine, a precision nutrition company that personalizes cellular health through DNA analysis and biometric data. A Harvard Business School MBA and former healthcare investment banker at Raymond James who worked on $5B+ in M&A deals, she pivoted from Wall Street to wellness after personally battling burnout and fatigue. She co-founded Rootine in 2018 with Dr. Daniel Wallerstorfer, raised a $3M seed round and a $10M Series A, launched the Apex Optimizers NFT project bridging web3 and health optimization, and hosts the Smart Health with Rachel Sanders podcast. She brings over a decade of health-tech experience across investment banking, product strategy, and company building to her venture investing role.
Michael Dearing is the founder and sole General Partner of Harrison Metal, a seed-stage venture capital firm based in Woodside, California. A former SVP at eBay who oversaw nearly $20 billion in gross merchandise sales, Dearing is one of Silicon Valley's most respected — and deliberately low-profile — early-stage investors. He taught entrepreneurial finance and management at Stanford for nearly a decade, coined the concept of 'cognitive distortions of founders,' and has backed companies including AdMob (acq. Google $750M), Acompli (acq. Microsoft $200M), MasterClass, PagerDuty, and Signal Sciences. He operates Harrison Metal with the philosophy that great general management is the scarcest resource in startup ecosystems.
Mar Hershenson is a Spanish-American venture capitalist, electrical engineer, and serial entrepreneur who co-founded Pear VC (originally Pejman Mar Ventures) in 2013 with no prior VC experience - learning the trade from Amazon-purchased books. A Stanford PhD who holds 14 patents and founded three startups (two acquired), she has grown Pear VC to over $800M AUM with a portfolio that includes DoorDash, Guardant Health, Gusto, and Dropbox. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (#29 in 2021), she also teaches Stanford's Lean Launchpad course, champions women in VC through All Raise and her Female Founder Circles initiative, and is known for her conviction that great founders are made, not born.
Anna Piñol Mediano is a Partner at NFX, a $450M seed-stage venture capital firm, where she leads investments in AI, marketplaces, fintech, and consumer companies across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. A founder-turned-investor, she co-founded Jupiter (YC S19) after her Stanford MBA and was recruited to NFX - the very firm that had backed her startup. Promoted to Partner in May 2024, she is widely recognized as one of Silicon Valley's leading voices on AI agents and the emerging AI workforce, having authored influential essays and spoken at Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series.
George Zachary is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures) and one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capitalists, known for seed-stage bets on Twitter, Yammer, and PillPack. A Greek-American MIT graduate who once helped build the Nintendo 64 at Silicon Graphics, he pivoted from consumer internet to bioengineering after a near-miss cancer scare in 2015 - writing more diligence on his first biotech deal than in the prior decade combined. He deploys capital guided by a single question: does this founder need - not just want - to build something big?
Miriam Rivera is the Co-Founder, CEO, and Managing Director of Ulu Ventures, one of the largest Latina-led venture capital firms in the United States with ~$400M AUM. A first-generation college student born to Puerto Rican migrant farmworkers, she earned four degrees from Stanford, joined Google as its second attorney and helped scale the company from $85M to $10B in revenue, then co-founded Ulu Ventures in 2008 with husband Clint Korver. Ulu's data-driven, bias-reducing investment model has backed 10 unicorns including Palantir and Guild Education, with a portfolio where 80% of founders are women, immigrants, or from minority groups.
Morgan Beller is a General Partner at NFX, the seed-stage venture firm known for backing network-effects businesses. Before VC, she co-founded Facebook's Libra (later Diem) digital currency project at age 25, making her one of the most consequential figures in crypto policy history. A Cornell statistics graduate, she cut her teeth at Andreessen Horowitz before stints at Medium and Facebook, where her geopolitical alarm about China's digital currency ambitions drove her to attempt something audacious: rebuild global money on a blockchain. She now backs founders in crypto, fintech, AI, and space from San Francisco.
Jake Gibson co-founded NerdWallet with his middle-school friend Tim Chen, bootstrapped it for two years with zero revenue before Google's algorithm updates turned it into a traffic machine, then stepped away as it scaled toward its NASDAQ IPO. He spent years as an angel investor making early bets on companies like Chipper Cash (unicorn) and Albert, before co-founding Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) with Sheel Mohnot in 2019. BTV has grown from a $75M debut fund to $450M+ AUM across three funds, focused exclusively on pre-seed and seed-stage fintech globally. In 2023, Gibson and Mohnot launched The Mint, a fintech-specific accelerator in San Francisco. He has a Kierkegaard quote tattooed on his ribs and describes his post-NerdWallet years as his 'commitment issues' phase.
Minal Hasan is a Silicon Valley-born venture capitalist, ex-lawyer, and entrepreneur who co-founded K2 Global - one of the largest inaugural women-run VC funds in history at $183M - and now runs Cyphr VC, a solo-GP seed fund focused on fintech, cybersecurity, and regulated tech infrastructure. Raised inside boardrooms (literally), she parlayed a dual career in Big Law and product marketing into becoming one of Silicon Valley's sharpest early-stage investors, with a portfolio spanning Palantir, Spotify, Coinbase, Airbnb, and 8 unicorns.
Nakul Mandan is the founder and managing partner of Audacious Ventures, a $250M pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. A graduate of IIT Kanpur and IIM Lucknow, he arrived in the US in 2009 on an H-1B visa and spent a decade investing at Battery Ventures and Lightspeed before launching Audacious in April 2020 — during COVID lockdowns. His firm's unconventional edge: embedding a full recruiting operation inside a VC fund, with technical recruiters actively running executive and engineering searches for portfolio companies. He has backed companies including WorkOS, Tome, FalconX, and Multiverse, and is known for his framework of five founder traits: high IQ, outsized ambition, the ability to make people believe, grit, and velocity.
Matt Lerner is the founder and CEO of SYSTM, a growth coaching and accelerator program for seed-stage startups. A former PayPal GM who helped grow the SMB business from $800M to $10B+, and ex-500 Startups partner who ran the Distro Dojo growth program in London, he now works personally with up to 80 founders per year helping them find their growth levers. He is the author of 'Growth Levers and How to Find Them,' an international bestseller advocating that 10% of what startups try drives 90% of their growth.
Pankaj Jain is the Founder and Managing Partner of Saka Ventures, a seed-stage VC fund based in New York City focused on Indian fintech, SaaS, and data-analytics startups targeting large global markets. A pioneer in India's startup ecosystem, he was a Partner at 500 Startups for four years, made early bets on unicorns like Innovaccer (533x) and ShipRocket (240x), co-founded HeadStart Network Foundation, and helped bring Startup Weekend to India before most Silicon Valley investors even knew the subcontinent's startup scene existed.
Todd Jackson is a Partner at First Round Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most storied seed-stage venture funds, where he backs pre-seed and seed-stage founders building B2B SaaS, AI, and enterprise products. His path to the table was anything but conventional: he helped build Gmail from beta to 200M users at Google, rewired Facebook's News Feed under Zuckerberg, built and sold a 2M-user Android app (Cover) to Twitter, and led Dropbox through its 2018 IPO as its first VP of Product and Design. He created First Round's widely cited Product-Market Fit Method, a rigorous four-level framework that has guided 75+ early-stage founders. Rare among VCs, Jackson holds all three operator lenses - big-tech product leader, startup founder, and public-company exec - and deploys them in service of the founders he backs.
Hunter Walk is the co-founder and partner at Homebrew, a self-funded seed-stage venture capital firm he built with Satya Patel after careers at Linden Lab (Second Life), Google, and YouTube. He also runs Screendoor LP, backing underrepresented emerging venture managers. His 'Bottom Up Economy' thesis targets scrappy teams of 5-50 taking on category incumbents - and his portfolio hits like Chime, Plaid, and Gusto prove the thesis works. A prolific blogger, former TV assistant, and forever a product person at heart.
Autosana AI is the first agentic QA platform for iOS, Android, and Web. Founded by Yuvan Sundrani and Jason Steinberg in June 2025 and backed by Y Combinator (S25 batch), Autosana replaces brittle test scripts with AI agents that navigate apps like real users, described in plain English. The company raised $3.2M in February 2026 from YC, Pioneer Fund, Phosphor Capital, DeVC, 468 Capital, and angels including Paul Graham. Revenue is growing 100%+ month over month, and the platform now protects apps serving over 100 million daily active users. The name comes from the Latin 'autosana' — to heal oneself — reflecting tests that evolve alongside the product rather than breaking on every UI change.