
Ecosystem Days 2022
Date and time
28 September 2022
8 AM – 8 PM
Transpose Platform Ecosystem Day is an invite-only global forum for LPs.
At this in-person summit, we’ll showcase some of who we believe are the most innovative industry thought leaders and disruptive entrepreneurs focused on solving challenges across sectors, including healthcare, biotech, aging & longevity, e-commerce, lending, global trade, machine learning, and deeptech.
On behalf of the entire team, welcome to Transpose Ecosystem Days. We’re excited to bring together the visionary investors and entrepreneurs in our portfolio for discussion, learning, and networking!
Transpose Platform Management (f.k.a TI Platform Management) is a venture firm founded in 2015 by Alex Bangash and Trang Nguyen. Since its inception, Transpose has built a unique network of founders who have collectively created over $50 billion in value, $25 billion in company exits, and $920 billion+ in investment market capitalization. There were ~74 unicorns across our portfolios as of March 10, 2022. Our involvement with startup incubation, venture studios and other disruptive venture platforms, in particular, has generated a rich and exciting network of some of the industry’s most inspiring minds. We have aided in the formation of four dozen studios and other transformative venture structures, and are eager to make introductions when we discover common goals or synergies between portfolio companies, entrepreneurs, and LPs. Transpose Platform Management LPs are some of the largest endowments, foundations, SWFs, pensions, and insurance companies in the world. Our relationships with many LPs in our network pre-date the formation of TI Platform. Our focus is always on serving our LPs by connecting them to the opportunities that best match their needs and their missions.
The Transpose Platform Mission
Transpose is guided by two investment theses. The first thesis is to find and support the ambitious entrepreneurs who are creating today’s most disruptive venture structures and companies. As a result of these efforts, our firm has been described as a “Y Combinator for proven entrepreneurs” as they embark on the next phase of their careers, whether that means starting a new business, incubating multiple startups through a venture studio, or launching a new venture fund. The second thesis is to assist institutional investors with off-market proprietary access to unique managers and entrepreneurs before they become access-constrained. We work to identify LPs who share our values and our mission, and who can bring something unique to the managers and entrepreneurs we fund. Collectively, our theses have led us to the cutting edge of developments in venture structures. We have been backing and aiding in the formation of venture studios and network-based models as well as the most disruptive start-ups since the firm’s inception. These represent a true innovation in venture development, one that adopts the principle of community to build network effects and talent pools that will create tomorrow’s multi-billion-dollar startups.
The History of Transpose Platform
In the beginning of 2022, we rebranded from TI Platform Management to Transpose Platform Management having observed that venture capital is evolving tremendously in recognition, funding, and sophistication – resultantly, entrepreneurs are creating combinations of venture structures. In response, the firm has quickly become home to talent of this caliber and ambition – ready to partner at the start of their journeys in one modality, and through their evolution into multi-modality venture entrepreneurs.
One core tenant of the history and success of Transpose is diversity. Transpose Platform is one of the most diverse venture firms in the world. Founded by two immigrants of color, the team has grown to include members throughout North America and Europe. Our investment team is 50% female and 90%+ minority. At Transpose, diversity isn’t just a priority: it’s who we are. “Our change to Transpose signals our focus on the founder’s journey as an investor. We are thought and capital partners of founders building companies and firms–Studios, platforms, DAOs, protocols, and factories of companies. We believe we are uniquely positioned to be partners of choice for founders in multiple modalities at the same time–all focused around innovation in building companies.” – Co-founder, Alex Bangash “We’re changing our name to reflect our new approach in supporting the most ambitious entrepreneurs scale not only within their own verticals, but across a combination of innovative venture structures as well as our effort in co-incubating the most ambitious idea with some of the most inspiring serial entrepreneurs,” said Co-founder, Trang Nguyen. “This is what Transpose stands for.”
Attendees

Aditya Agarwal
Partner-in-residence, South Park Commons

Adrian Locher
Co-founder and CEO, Merantix

Alastair Goldfisher
Communications, Transpose Platform

Alex Bangash
Co-founder, Transpose Platform

Alex Haro
Co-founder, Hubble Network

Anton Orlich
Executive Director, Kaiser Permanente

Ashley Acosta
Founder, Maca

Ben Borodach
Co-founder and CEO, April Tax

Ben Milne
Co-founder and CEO, Brale

Brian Neale
CIO, University of Nebraska Foundation

Brian O'Neil
CIO, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Chester Ng
General Parnet, Atomic

D. Sivakumar
Co-founder, Tonita

Edith Harbaugh
Co-founder and CEO, LaunchDarkly

Eli Broverman
Founder, Betterment

Fred Greear
CIO, Carilion Clinic

Garry Tan
CEO, Y Combinator

Ian Lee
Founder and CEO, Syndicate

Idan Beck
Co-founder and CEO, Epoch

Janette Wiget
CFO, Merantix

Jeff Cruttenden
Founder, Acorn and Say

Jeremy Kranz
Managing Partner, Sentinel Global

John Kim
Co-founder and CEO, Sendbird

Jesse Robbins
General Partner, Heavybit

Jonas Muff
Founder, Vara

K.C. Krieger
CIO, Broad Family Office and Broad Foundations

Luis Vera
CEO, Zippedi

Muthu Muthiah
CIO, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta

Narinder Singh
Co-founder and CEO, LookDeep Health

Nikki Pechet
Co-founder and CEO, Homebound

Nikos Liodakis
VP of Investments, Transpose Platform

Paul Willard
Co-founder, Grep VC

Phineas Barnes
Co-founder, Sneakerhead

Prabhu Palani
CIO, City of San Jose Retirement System

Rabi Alam
Founder, Counter

Rashik Adhikari
Founder and CEO, Renegade Insurance

Romain Lapeyre
Co-founder and CEO, Gorgias

Sarah Kunst
Managing Partner, Cleo Capital

Shashank P.S.
CEO, CasaOne

Sid Kosaraju
SVP & GM, Change Healthcare

Sid Viswanathan
Co-founder and CEO, Truepill

Stuart Mason
CIO, University of Minnesota

Sumon Sadhu
Investment Partner, Transpose Platform

Suruchi Gupta
Founder and CEO, GIANT Protocol

Tina Surh
CIO and Founder, Sonamu Group

Trang Nguyen
Co-Founder/Member of General Partner at Transpose Platform

Trent Harvey
Co-founder and CEO, Covie

Vinay Jain
Co-founder, Sesame Labs

Xavier Legros
Founder, Fund Cogito
Attendees
Alex has been one of the most supportive investors we’ve had. In the first few months of working together, he’s introduced us to partners and helped us to think about our product strategy. We really appreciate our partnership.
The event was a great way to share The GP’s differentiated approach to venture investing with an informed group of Limited Partners and industry experts and engage in meaningful conversations with these folks throughout the day. Overall the event was well run, logistics were smooth etc
The event brought together leading LPs, investors and entrepreneurs in a structured format that best allowed for learnings, transparent exchanges of innovative views and the formation of great relationships and identification of great opportunities.
I really enjoyed the event. It was great to hear from other founders and thought leaders on the next generation of problems they were tackling. Also was awesome to meet some of the LPs as founders don’t get to connect with the LPs behind the funds as often. I received a lot of inspiration and a boost to energy from attending the event, so thank you for hosting such a good event…
I never miss a Transpose Summit. Alex, Trang, and the entire team bring together a stellar community of investors and entrepreneurs for a couple days, and we’ve built some of our strongest relationships through their ecosystem.
Transpose is uniquely skilled at bringing together LPs, founders, and investors in a way that allows for covering the maximal learning across a wide breadth of topics. We’re continually grateful for the relationship we’ve been able to build with them..
Trang Nguyen co-founded Transpose Management in 2015. Trang was also a former operator and executive member of Trusted Insight, where she worked closely with engineers, ran products and pricing (such as launching the Institutional LP Ranking List, Institutional Forum, Global Institutional Summit & Events, and LP/GP Job Board), developed the very first partnerships for TI with Fortune 500 corporations with a focus on Japan and the US, and grew an institutional LP community for the platform. Trang launched multiple LP products and features on Trusted Insight to increase user engagement and scale the LP network on the platform to over 35,000+ LP members. Prior to Transpose Platform, Trang assisted in spearheading the investment initiatives and managing portfolios of both endowment and corporate money for Sutter Health. With a total AUM of $9 billion, she helped Sutter Health with asset allocation and manager selection for public and private markets. She also traded and helped run a $1B credit portfolio, including structured products and corporates. Earlier in her career, she held various finance and marketing roles at Visa, Bank of New York Mellon, and startups.
Alex is the managing director of Transpose Platform, an anchor fund for the most disruptive venture funds of this decade. He is also the co-founder and former CEO of Trusted Insight, a machine learning–driven platform that hosts the world’s largest network of institutional investors. Prior to TI Platform, Alex managed capital for clients at premier endowments, foundations, family offices, insurance firms, sovereign wealth funds, and pension funds since 2003.
He has helped invest over $2 billion in 50 funds with a track record of investing over $1 billion in 50+ funds for institutional investors with an IRR of 30%+ and 2x NAV. He advised the first checks in Accel, First Round Capital, Founders Fund, Emergence, Y Combinator, Khosla, SaaStr, Initialized, Crystal Towers, and Baseline. Earlier in his career, Alex was an engineer and executive at AT&T, Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs, and GE. Alex holds an MBA from the Wharton School (where he is a frequent guest lecturer); an M.Eng in Operation Research from Cornell; and a BS in Computer Science, English and Economics from Cornell.
Eli Broverman is Co-Founder of Treasury. Treasury is a global platform created by the founders of Betterment, Acorns, and Rise to support the most ambitious ideas in financial technology. Eli has been at the forefront of the FinTech boom as a founder, investor, and adviser. He is co-founder of Betterment, the world’s first robo-adviser, that has scale to over $20b in AUM and 500k customers. He is a regular guest on CNBC, FOX, and Bloomberg TV, and tech industry events.
Prabhu is a veteran of the investment industry who brings over 23 years of investment experience with global investment leaders, including Barclays Global Investors, Franklin Templeton Investments, and Mellon Capital Management. He was Managing Director and Senior Investment Strategist at Mellon Capital Management, where he helped build the firm’s quantitative equity capabilities. Previously, he was an SVP and Portfolio Manager at Franklin Templeton Investment managing structured equity portfolios. He has also held fixed income portfolio management positions at BGI and NetWest Bank. He is also a former Trustee of the Federated City Employees Retirement System where he served on the Investment Committee for 6 months. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose and a volunteer with the City of Fremont Police Department.
Jeff Cruttenden is a currently a Co-Founder and General Partner at Treasury. He is also the Co-Founder of Acorns, leading financial wellness system with over 5M users, and SAY, a technology platform for open communication between companies and their owners by connecting shareholders to each other and empowering them to access their full ownership rights
Adrian Locher is the co-founder and CEO of Berlin-based Merantix, the world’s first venture studio for AI, and initiator of the AI Campus, Europe’s leading physical AI hub. He has been a serial entrepreneur and investor for the past 20 years, founding more than 10 companies both in Europe and the US, in digital healthcare, e-commerce, and AI. Adrian holds a degree in business and economics from the University of St. Gallen (HSG).
Jeremy Kranz is the Managing Partner of Sentinel Global, a new venture capital fund focused on the institutional applications of blockchain technology. Prior to this, he spent past two decades at GIC, where he created and led one of the best-performing tech investment programs and portfolios in the world. He initiated GIC’s blockchain investment program and was the founder of GIC’s global business development program, the Bridge Forum.
Aditya Agarwal is a Partner with the SPC Fund. He was the CTO and VP of Engineering at Dropbox where he scaled the engineering team from 25 to 1000. Before Dropbox, Aditya co-founded Cove—a company that was building modern collaboration software. Prior to Cove, Aditya was one of Facebook’s first engineers. He helped build the first versions of key products like Search, NewsFeed and Messenger. He then became Facebook’s first director of Product Engineering, overseeing engineering for products like NewsFeed, Profile, Groups and Events. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Anton Orlich is the previous Head of Alternative Investments at Kaiser Permanente, which has both foundation and corporate pension capital pools totaling about $150 billion with over a 40% allocation to alternatives in the following asset classes: absolute return, private credit, private equity, and real assets. The private equity program includes buyout, growth, venture, and secondaries. Also, Kaiser Permanente pursues co-investments and direct investments across private markets. Anton’s prior experience includes tenures at Pivotal Group (a family office), CalPERS, Neuberger Berman, and McKinsey & Co. He holds a B.A., summa cum laude, in economics from Columbia and a PhD in political science from Yale. Anton is a U.S. Navy veteran and deployed to Afghanistan as an intelligence officer.
Alex Haro is the cofounder and CEO of Hubble Network. Hubble is building a global satellite network that any Bluetooth-enabled device can connect to, even without cellular reception. Hubble’s mission is to get a billion devices connected to the network and unlock a new era of human-machine collaboration. Prior to cofounding Hubble, Mr. Haro was the co-founder and CTO of Life360, a market leading app for families, with features that range from communications to driving safety and location sharing. Life360 is based in San Francisco and has over 40 million monthly active users (MAU). In 2015, Mr. Haro was recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 in Consumer Technology. Prior to Life360, he worked on Orbited. Mr. Haro studied Computer Science at Pomona College / Harvey Mudd.
Ashley Acosta is the founder and CEO of MACA. Previously, she was the VP of Revenue at Pipe. She joined the company as the second business hire. She managed and led led Sales, CS, and built the operational foundation reach $2B valuation in less than a year post-launch. She also was on the Sales and Partnerships team at Brex joining the company as the 7th employee.
Brian is responsible for the oversight and investment the University of Nebraska Foundation’s assets. His principal duties include establishing long-term asset allocation policies and short-term tactical tilts; investment manager research and selection; portfolio compliance and oversight; and serving as principal staff liaison to the board of directors and its investment committee. He joined the foundation in 2014 and has more than 20 years of professional financial and institutional investment experience.
Brian O’Neil joined the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as Chief Investment Officer in January 2003. He is responsible for the Foundation’s $15 billion investment portfolio.
O’Neil worked at the Equitable Life Assurance Society (now AXA Equitable) from 1980 to 2002. He was named Chief Investment Officer in 1992, at the time the company demutualized and went public. In this role he was responsible for Equitable’s general account investment portfolio, as well as relationships with ratings agencies and investors. In 1995, he moved to AXA’s headquarters in Paris, where we was global head of Asset/Liability Management and, in 1997, was named Chief Investment Officer of AXA Investment Managers Paris. On his return to Equitable, he became head of the Variable Life and Annuity Funds Management business.
O’Neil is a trustee of the Brooklyn Public Library System.
He received an MBA from the Columbia Graduate School of Business, and an AB from Princeton University. He received the CFA designation in 1983.
O’Neil lives in Brooklyn, is married, and has four children.
Chester Ng is a general partner at Atomic, the venture studio and fund that brings together ideas, talent, and resources to build companies in parallel. Chester has over two decades (and three downturns) of experience building companies from 0-to-scale. At Atomic, he has co-founded and funded dozens of companies including Bungalow, Found, Hims & Hers, Homebound, OpenStore, and Replicant. After living his entire life in California, Chester recently moved, with his wife and two daughters, to Miami to help build one of the fastest growing startup ecosystems in, what Financial Times dubbed as “the most important city in America.”
Siva (D. Sivakumar) is co-founder and CEO of Tonita. Tonita’s mission is to reinvent commerce search through two ingredients: the magic of Natural Language Understanding, and the power and flexibility of Cloud APIs. Prior to founding Tonita, Siva was a Director of AI Research at Google, where his team delivered breakthrough technologies to Google Search and Search Advertising. Siva’s research career spans more than two decades, and includes numerous highly-influential publications across the foundations of computer science and web search technology.
Fred joined Carilion Clinic, a Virginia-based healthcare system, in 2015 to lead its investment function, overseeing $3 billion across operating capital and defined benefit pension assets. Previously, he worked at Huntington Ingalls Industries with oversight responsibility for hedge fund and fixed income pension investments and as a generalist at The Pension Boards-United Church of Christ. Prior to moving to the plan sponsor side of investment management, he held different roles at Cohen & Steers and Lord Abbett. He has a Master of Business Administration degree in finance from Vanderbilt University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Denison University and is a CFA charterholder.
Garry is a designer/engineer turned early-stage investor. He was a partner at Y Combinator for nearly five years, advising and funding over 600 companies and more than a thousand founders. He co-founded the YC-backed blog platform Posterous (Top 200 Quantcast site, acquired by Twitter in 2012). Before that, he was employee #10 at Palantir, where he was a founding member of the engineering team for Palantir’s financial analysis product, and also designed Palantir’s logo. He has a BS in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford.
Ian is the Co-Founder of Syndicate, a startup building investing infrastructure for web3 that has raised over $28M from a16z, Kleiner Perkins, IDEO, Circle, Coinbase, OpenSea, Uniswap, Carta, and 300+ investors. Previously, Ian was Co-Founder and Managing Partner of IDEO CoLab Ventures, a crypto venture fund backed by IDEO focused on web3, crypto, and blockchain startups, where he is still a Venture Partner. From 2017-2021, Ian led investments and helped incubate 80+ crypto startups in the areas of DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and more. From 2014-2017, Ian was the head of crypto at Citigroup and Citi Ventures globally. Ian spent a decade in the finance and management consulting industries and holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and dual BA degrees from UCLA in Economics and Human Computer Interaction.
An immigrant to Silicon Valley in the 90s, I grew up surrounded and obsessed with tech, watching start ups go from garage to Opening Bell and back again. Now a “serial entrepreneur” spanning HW/IoT to VR and AI/ML, I found a refuge at South Park Commons during the pandemic as my co-founder Akash and I incubated our respective next chapter. Epoch’s goal is to help studios bring better games to market faster by building world class SDLC solutions for game development. To start, we’re enabling critical functions such as QA and testing with world class tooling, and automation.
Jessie is a General Partner at Heavybit. Previously, he was the co-founder of Chef and Orion Labs. He was the first chair of O’Reilly’s Velocity conference kickstarting the DevOps movement and served as Amazon’s original “Master of Disaster.” He is an avid dev community-builder and technical advisor and holds board positions with Sanity, Mobot, and others.
Janette is CFO and member of the management board at the Berlin-based AI venture studio Merantix, as well as co-founder of the AI Campus. She oversees the development of Merantix’s venture studio operations and has been strongly advocating for deep tech investments in the DACH region while leading the efforts of the Merantix venture fund. She is an alumna of the University of St. Gallen (HSG).
John Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Sendbird, one of TI Platform’s most exciting portfolio companies. Sendbird offers an in-app chat API that allows app developers to add chat functionality without designing their own bot. More recently, they’ve added an API for in-app voice and video calls. Companies like Reddit, Hinge, Doordash, and Teladoc have used the Sendbird API to deliver customized in-app chat interactions for its 150 million users. Sendbird’s success offers proof of concept for one of TI Platform’s investment theses: companies developing practical APIs with widespread adoption potential, we believe, are the architects of tomorrow’s internet. This year, Sendbird raised a $100
Driven by a vision to increase global access to high-quality healthcare, Jonas has dedicated his career to transforming healthcare with artificial intelligence. To realize this vision, Jonas works every day to create an environment at Vara where his team can challenge the status quo while challenging themselves to discover new possibilities in science. Jonas was born and raised in Switzerland. He studied business at St. Gallen (HSG). Soon after, he grew START, Europe’s leading student conference for entrepreneurship to over 2,000 participants. Later, he joined Europe’s leading venture studio, Merantix, as one of the first employees.
Luis is an industrial engineer and a serial entrepreneur with more than thirty years of experience in the retail space. He is from the first generation of Endeavor entrepreneurs. He has deep knowledge about the inefficiencies of the bricks and mortar stores which have worked mainly by trial and error when planning layouts and merchandising their products. Currently, Vera leads Zippedi, a company that captures store data using a robot and, thanks to artificial intelligence models, converts unstructured data into structured data, creating the digital twin of the store. Vera’s vision is that each retailer operates with a digital twin, a powerful tool that will allow them to handle stock-outs, manage assortments, errors of implementation, and much more.
K.C. Krieger is the Chief Investment Officer of The Broad Foundations and Broad Family Office. Prior to joining Broad in 2001, K.C. was a senior consulting associate with Cambridge Associates. K.C. is a member of the investment committees for the Broad Institute, City of Hope, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Broad Stage. In addition, K.C. is a trustee and co-chair of the finance committee at Marlborough School, a secondary school for girls. K.C. is a CFA® charterholder and graduated with a B.A. in Economics magna cum laude from Colby College.
Muthu is the Chief Investment Officer at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, stewarding the institution’s assets to create returns that advance the CHOA mission. Previously, he oversaw the strategic and sustainable growth of Group Health Foundation’s investments. Muthu is a seasoned asset management professional, with experience investing globally across various asset classes, including private equity, venture capital, real estate, real assets, and both public and private investments in emerging economies. He has led investment teams and strategies at Emory Investment Management, Covariance Capital Management, the University of Richmond, the State Board of Administration of Florida, and RSM Equico. Outside of work, Muthu reads a lot of nonfiction books, stays active by bicycling or jogging, and enjoys watching Tamil movies. He also likes to travel, including visiting his family and community in India. Muthu holds a BHM from Mangalore University and an MBA from Rollins College.
Narinder is the Co-Founder and CEO of LookDeep Health. Prior, he was the Co-Founder and President of Appirio, a pioneer in cloud computing and first cloud investment of Salesforce.com and Sequoia Capital. The company grew to over 1200 employees and was acquired in 2016 by Wipro. Previous to Appirio, Narinder worked in the Office of the CEO at SAP and ran product development at webMethods.
He holds a BS from Northwestern, an MBA from Wharton and Masters in Translational Medicine from UCSF and Berkeley. He currently serves on the boards of Par Technologies (NYSE:PAR) and the Sikh Coalition.
Nikki Pechet is the Co-Founder and CEO of Homebound, a technology-enabled home builder backed by Khosla, Atomic, Thrive and Google Ventures. She started her career in real estate in New York City, spent almost a decade at Bain & Company, and was an early executive at Thumbtack, the fastest-growing home services marketplace, now valued at over $3B.
Nikki also serves on the Board of Directors for Thrivent Financial, a Fortune 500 financial services company, and is an investor in a range of early-stage technology companies. She makes her home in the Bay Area with her husband and three small kids.
Trent is a technologist, engineer, and co-founder of insurance infrastructure company Covie. Born and raised in small-town middle-America, he found himself always dreaming about what was just over the horizon and the possibilities of what could be. Being an ambitious dreamer as a child set the stage for a diverse career that ranged from being a freelance engineer to leading teams at Fortune 500 companies to product leadership at a major digital agency to founding 5 start-ups before Covie. Today Trent is leading Covie to revolutionize how data moves across the insurance industry.
Trang Nguyen co-founded Transpose Management in 2015. Trang was also a former operator and executive member of Trusted Insight, where she worked closely with engineers, ran products and pricing (such as launching the Institutional LP Ranking List, Institutional Forum, Global Institutional Summit & Events, and LP/GP Job Board), developed the very first partnerships for TI with Fortune 500 corporations with a focus on Japan and the US, and grew an institutional LP community for the platform. Trang launched multiple LP products and features on Trusted Insight to increase user engagement and scale the LP network on the platform to over 35,000+ LP members. Prior to Transpose Platform, Trang assisted in spearheading the investment initiatives and managing portfolios of both endowment and corporate money for Sutter Health. With a total AUM of $9 billion, she helped Sutter Health with asset allocation and manager selection for public and private markets. She also traded and helped run a $1B credit portfolio, including structured products and corporates. Earlier in her career, she held various finance and marketing roles at Visa, Bank of New York Mellon, and startups.
Tina Surh is Founder and CIO of Sonamu Group and invests with a broad and flexible charter across global asset classes and a simple purpose – sustained exceptional compounding – on behalf of a select group of family office and foundation partners. The central theme in Ms. Surh’s former CIO roles has been leading and accomplishing significant positive change: for New York University, where she is credited with transforming the endowment and producing leading risk-adjusted returns over a decade while building out a robust platform, and more recently for Gruss & Co.’s single-family office, leading a full program redesign and exceeding performance goals. Tina has also worked as a private equity investor, and started her career at Bain & Co. She graduated from Harvard Business School and from Tufts University, where she majored in drama and design, and is now a Trustee Emeritus. She serves on a variety of boards, including Salvation Army Investment Committee, Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, and Tufts Engineering School, and champions creativity applied to any vocation.
Sumon Sadhu, a serial entrepreneur, former YC founder, and angel investor, joined as an investment partner in 2020. He was also summer 2020 YC Demo Fund lead. Sumon co-founded Snaptalent (YC W’08) and was the CRO at Plato Design (YC S’18). He is an active angel investor in more than 30 companies, including emerging global companies like ClearTax (YC W14) in India, Xendit (YC S15) in Indonesia, WaystoCap (YC W17) in Africa, as well as leading Silicon Valley companies like Benchling, Labelbox, Safegraph, Padlet, and Persona Identities. He was former CEO and co-founder of Muse.ai, served on the advisory board of Seedcamp, and was chairman & founding president of Imperial Entrepreneurs.
Stuart Mason is the associate vice president and chief investment officer at the University of Minnesota, which has $2.5 billion in assets under management including an endowment totaling $1.3 billion. Mason is also the portfolio manager for the endowment’s venture capital allocation. Previously, Mason spent 15 years as a senior investment banker or executive officer in several investment banks including Dougherty & Company, EVERERN Securities and Dain Rauscher Corporation. He also served for 10 years as a vice president of Wells Fargo Corporation. Mason holds an MBA from the University of Minnesota and a B.A. in chemistry and biology from St. Olaf College.
Fund Cogito: Data at scale for Asset Allocators From automated document gathering to data extraction at scale, during this live demo you will learn how FC can bring operational efficiency to your organization with a streamlined document gathering from across 150+ portals to automated data extraction to give you faster and more accurate insights that enable better investments.
Suruchi Gupta is the Founder & CEO of GIANT Protocol that is bringing liquidity to bandwidth and creating financial markets for bandwidth. She began her Silicon Valley career as a software developer and technical lead at Juniper Networks after immigrating from India to pursue her Masters in Computer Science. Determined to start a company that would impact the lives of billions, she began participating in weekend hackathons to validate her ideas and grow her network. She won them all and the win that would kick start her entrepreneurial journey was a global hackathon organized by TATA Communications, a subsidiary of the $300B+ TATA Group. After getting incubated by TATA Communications, she launched and scaled GIANT Connect, a top-ranked global connectivity app, raising $5M+ from VCs to build GIANT Protocol to decentralize and democratize access to the internet and financial services for all.
Sid Viswanathan is the Co-founder and CEO of Truepill. In 2016, he founded the company with a mission to transform consumer healthcare. Trupeill shipped its first prescription over five years ago and has since expanded its services to include telehealth, diagnostics, and pharmacy, creating innovative solutions for leading companies and delivering convenient, accessible care to their consumers. Prior to Truepill, Sid founded CardMunch, a business-card scanning app that was acquired by LinkedIn. Sid started his career in Johnson & Johnson’s Global Operations Leadership Development program, and graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering.
Sarah Kunst is Managing Director of Cleo Capital and a contributing editor at Marie Claire Magazine. Kunst has been named a Future Innovator by Vanity Fair, She has been recognized for her work in Business Insider as a 30 under 30 Women in Tech and Top African-American in Tech, Forbes 30 Under 30 All Star Alum & Pitchbook Top Black VC To Watch and honored as a top woman in VC by the Wall St. Journal. She was also named a coach for the Cartier Women’s Initiative.
Romain Lapeyre is the co-founder & CEO of Gorgias, a customer service platform built for eCommerce.
He started the company with his co-founder Alex in 2015. Gorgias is now used by 30,000 people every day, and over 10,000 companies, to provide a better customer experience to ecommerce shoppers.
Romain loves leveraging the power of data to provide value to ecommerce businesses.
Nikos worked in consulting at Keystone Strategy for 2 years, working directly with Fortune 500 companies on market research and new product development. His main focus was developing go-to-market strategies within the technology sector. Before this he worked at Lucas Venture Group where he primarily performed due diligence on early/mid stage (series B & C) venture deals. Nikos graduated from Stanford University and holds a BSc in Management Science and Engineering.
Rashik Adhikari is the Founder & CEO at Renegade Insurance. Renegade is more than just a modern P&C insurance agency. Previously, he was an investor at Soros Fund Management and spent time as an investment banking analysts at Citi Bank. He received his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Paul Willard is a partner at Grep VC. Paul, a venture capitalist, has engaged in the startup world as both an employee and an investor. Paul has a track record for investing in service robotics startups including companies like Zipline and Cobalt Robotics. His other investments include unicorns such as Boom and Carta. His current venture, Grep VC, seeks to increase the visibility of companies that are delivering improved services in physical space. As Paul might say, RaaS (Robotics as a Service) is the new SaaS.
Phin spent six years building sneakers and helping to scale revenue as Creative Director for Footwear. As a Partner at First Round, Phin defined venture capital as a product that founders buy with their equity. He turned that idea into a cultural mandate inside First Round’s decision-making processes, which led to partnerships with generational founders and inspired community programs like Angel Track and Dorm Room Fund.
Shashank is the co-founder and CEO of CasaOne. Previously, he was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel. Prior to that, he was an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners with a focus on internet marketplaces and SaaS. He previously founded Shopmonk, a cross-border ecommerce company in South East Asia and Atticous, a marketing automation company. He started his career at SAP where he led the development of SAP’s cloud retail product for emerging markets.
Sid Kosaraju is an active healthcare investor and an Advisor to Transpose Platform. He has 20+ years of experience creating/growing healthcare businesses that have made significant impact. He has raised financing from marquee investors to scale platforms and achieve four successful exits (one NASDAQ IPO and three strategic sales). Sid most recently served as SVP & GM for Change Healthcare (NASDAQ: CHNG), leading a key $500M+ software business through the COVID pandemic and double-digit growth over a period where the company stock price more than doubled.
Sid earned an M.B.A. from the Wharton School and an A.B. from Harvard College.
Alastair Goldfisher serves as communications consultant for Transpose Platform. He is a longtime business reporter and editor, having covered all aspects of venture capital during the last 30 years. Most recently, he was editor of Venture Capital Journal for more than a decade. Prior to that, he reported on venture capital, tech, startups and business marketing for PE Week, Silicon Valley Business Journal and other publications.