Wayee Chu

Wayee Chu's first professional instinct was Wall Street. Morgan Stanley, then Merrill Lynch equity research. Finance, the practical choice of a daughter of Chinese immigrants who came to Connecticut for the American idea that education opens doors. By 2005, she had quit chasing yield on financial stocks and moved to California to chase something harder to model: whether venture capital could close the achievement gap.

At NewSchools Venture Fund, she spent eight years building a case. In 2006, she co-founded the NewSchools Seed Fund - one of the first dedicated early-stage edtech investment vehicles in the United States, at a moment when the very word "edtech" was still finding its footing. She ran their EdTech Entrepreneurship Lab in partnership with Teach For America and the Stanford d.school. She learned, methodically, how education entrepreneurs think and fail and occasionally transform something.

In 2015, she co-founded Reach Capital with Jennifer Carolan, Esteban Sosnik, and Shauntel Garvey. By 2023, Reach had raised its fourth fund at $215M - alongside the first-ever Founders' Fund, in which 48 current and former portfolio company founders participated as limited partners. The firm had crossed $570M in assets under management. The portfolio included ClassDojo, Gradescope, Replit, Swing Education, Clayful, PAPER, and well over a hundred others. Fifteen companies had exited.

The investment thesis at Reach is deceptively elegant: learning, health, and the future of work are not three separate markets. They are one continuous problem of human potential. A student who can't access mental health support won't learn. A worker who can't upskill won't find economic mobility. Wayee has backed companies operating at every intersection of that triangle - from on-demand student coaching (Clayful) to AI-native developer education (Replit) to substitute teacher workforce infrastructure (Swing Education).

She describes early-stage investing through the lens of art collecting. Founders are artists. Conviction must come before consensus. The best bets look eccentric until they look obvious. She is, not coincidentally, a serious contemporary art collector and sits on the board of SFMOMA - one of the most prestigious museum trustee positions in Northern California.

On AI in education, she is careful where others are breathless. "Make sure educators are armed with knowledge of how the technology works," she said at the ASU+GSV Summit. The equity risk of AI in schools is not theoretical: if powerful tools reach well-resourced districts first and under-resourced districts last, the achievement gap doesn't close - it calcifies. Reach has been investing in AI-enabled education since its first fund, long before the topic commanded conference keynotes.

In 2018, she became a founding member of All Raise, the nonprofit organization that has worked to increase the share of venture capital going to female founders and to grow the percentage of female decision-makers inside VC firms. The same year, she joined the board of the University of Michigan Alumni Association - a nod to the institution that gave the daughter of immigrants a B.A. in Economics and Political Science in 1997, and that she has supported ever since through the UM Museum of Art's Leadership Council.

Her advice to portfolio founders is short. "This is a marathon, not a sprint. Ruthless prioritization." At a moment when the education technology market swings between hype cycles and correction, that cadence has kept Reach's founders grounded. The firm's north star, she has said, is impact - not returns as a proxy, but impact as the primary measure, with returns following.

In April 2025, she was named a Power of Women honoree at the ASU+GSV Summit - the education sector's most visible annual gathering. The recognition landed in a year when Reach's portfolio was navigating AI's full arrival in the classroom and Wayee had added board observer roles at two new companies. The marathon continues. The prioritization, ruthless as ever.