true-ventures
(5)
Amy Errett Bet Her Fourth Act on the Hair-Color Aisle
She left venture capital to fix a neglected aisle, named the company after her daughter, and built Madison Reed around five words that still run the place.
Catheryn Li
Catheryn Li is the co-founder and CEO of Simple AI, a San Francisco voice-AI startup building phone agents that sell. After four years at Y Combinator - where she led the software team behind Startup School, the YC Library, and Co-Founder Matching - she and Zach Kamran started Simple AI in the 2024 YC batch. Their agents are trained on top human reps, know every product SKU, and the company says they outperform trained live reps by 30% on conversion and upsell. Simple AI raised a $14M seed round led by First Harmonic with Y Combinator, True Ventures, and Massive Tech Ventures. Li holds degrees in computer science and mathematics from MIT.
Tara Raffi
Tara Raffi is the founder and CEO of Almond ObGyn, a venture-backed, tech-enabled women's health practice she co-founded with Carly Allen in 2021. A former McKinsey consultant who built the firm's $50M internal tech incubator and was an early operations and marketing hire at the location-data company Factual, she started Almond after years of frustrating personal experiences trying to book gynecological care. Backed by Y Combinator (S22), True Ventures and others with a $7M seed round, Almond pitches itself as 'One Medical for women's health,' combining in-person LA clinics with telehealth. Raffi and Allen were named to Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders 250 list.
Darshan Shankar
Darshan Shankar is the founder and CEO of Bigscreen, the VR company that started as a social movie theater you could share with strangers and grew into a hardware maker shipping the Bigscreen Beyond, billed as the world's smallest VR headset. A self-described VR obsessive and UC Berkeley EECS graduate, he sold his first Y Combinator startup before turning the whole company toward virtual reality in 2014. Today Bigscreen builds quarter-pound headsets with custom 3D-scanned facepads and OLED microdisplays, ships to eight regions, and is on track to cross $100M in annual revenue.
Laura Mediorreal
Laura Mediorreal is a Colombian-American entrepreneur and AI/ML product leader, currently Co-Founder & CEO of a stealth-mode startup based in San Francisco. She earned her MBA from Harvard Business School (Class of 2025) and holds degrees from Stanford University. Her career spans product management roles at Microsoft and Meta, a venture capital fellowship at True Ventures, and now building her own company at the intersection of artificial intelligence and enterprise software.