Women Startup Challenge

2020 Tech Grant

Meera is a Senior Associate at Obvious Ventures in San Francisco, where she sources, evaluates, and supports early-stage consumer businesses. 

Prior to joining OV, Meera invested in and advised high-growth technology companies at Morgan Stanley. Across the firm’s New York and Bay Area offices, she spent time in Technology Investment Banking, Public Equities, and the firm’s early stage technology accelerator, the Multicultural Innovation Lab, focused on female and multicultural entrepreneurs.

Prior to Morgan Stanley, Meera worked in product and marketing roles at PayPal and Stella & Dot respectively, aligning with her keen interest in consumer businesses and the solutions that enable them to scale.

Meera holds a BS in Management Science and Engineering with a focus on Entrepreneurship from Stanford University. In her spare time, she enjoys horseback riding, traveling, and embracing the experience economy.

Micah Smurthwaite joined Next47 in 2020 and is a Partner based in Palo Alto. His focus is on sourcing and supporting investments in enterprise software, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and frontier technology companies.

Before joining Next47, Micah was the first sales hire at Cloudflare where he was part of the team that grew revenue from $1M to over $100M. While scaling Cloudflare he opened Cloudflare’s EMEA sales office and established Cloudflare’s channel sales division. Micah has supported founders by helping them grow revenue as a Venture Partner at Alchemist Accelerator.

Outside of the office, you can find Micah coaching youth basketball, glassblowing, or in a yoga class. Micah holds a BS from Brigham Young University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Seble Tareke-Williams is a real estate entrepreneur and advisor with a professional background leading community economic development programs across a wide strategy spectrum including starting and managing a Brooklyn, NY-based workforce development and entrepreneurship resource center to leading an urban real estate fund.  Seble is an active angel investor, primarily with Pipeline Angels and Portfolia, focused on capitalizing companies led by diverse founders.  Seble received her B.A. with honors from American University and a M.B.A. from Harvard Business School where she was a Toigo Finance Fellow.

Nimi is a Partner at BoxGroup, an early stage venture firm, where she focuses on investments in financial tech, healthcare, marketplaces, and software. BoxGroup's portfolio includes companies such as PillPack, Plaid, Airtable, ClassPass, Warby Parker, Flatiron Health, and Ro, among many others. In her role, she sources and invests in entrepreneurs building disruptive technology companies that aim to create category defining businesses.

Prior to BoxGroup, she worked in Investment Banking at J.P. Morgan and later as an Associate Product Marketing Manager at Google, focused on growing small business advertisers. She graduated with an Honors BA degree from Harvard, majoring in Economics and Government, and also received an MBA with Distinction from Harvard Business School. In 2017, Nimi was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Venture Capital.

Aaron combines 19 years of deep finance and technology expertise, having developed advanced equites Program Trading and foreign exchange derivatives software at Goldman Sachs and GFI Group, with operational experience working CEOs to build growth stage companies and venture capital experience from DFJ Gotham Ventures. As the first Managing Entrepreneurial Officer at Cornell Tech, the billion-dollar Tech Campus in NYC initiated by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Aaron pioneered the campus’ Startup Studio culture, shepherding deep technology startups toward commercial success and incubating companies such as Trigger Finance (acquired by Circle) and Bowtie (acquired by MindBody).

He is co-founder and managing partner of 645 Ventures, an early-stage firm that applies an institutional model to investing in early-stage companies, leveraging advanced proprietary software. He oversees the firm’s proprietary software and operating strategies and has led investments in the firm’s notable portfolio companies such as Fly Labs (acquired by Google), Source 3 (acquired by Facebook), Abacus (acquired by Certify), Iterable, FiscalNote, Godlbelly, and Squire.

Aaron received a BS in Computer Science (Cum Laude Honors) from Morehouse College and an MBA from Cornell University.

For over a decade, Andrew has focused on clean technology and clean energy solutions. He started down the clean tech path with Energy Innovations in 2003, which he grew from a business plan to a major solar developer serving customers like Google, Disney, Sony Pictures, and British Telecom. After selling the company to Suntech in 2008, Andrew served as Chief Commercial Officer at Suntech as well as Vice President of Global Product Strategy. During his tenure, Suntech became the largest solar company in the world. After leaving Suntech, Andrew spent two years as Vice President of Distributed Generation for Nextera Energy, the largest clean energy developer in the US. Before his clean tech career, Andrew spent a decade building companies in the early days of “Web 1.0.” In 1998 Andrew co-founded Bigstep.com, an e-commerce platform designed to serve the needs of small businesses entering the Internet age. He has been supporting the enterprising ideas of people power ever since. Andrew serves on the Board of Directors for Sighten and Plant Prefab and as a Board Observer for Enbala, Lilium, and Proterra. He is also a member of the NREL Investor Advisory Board, as well serving on the Board of Managers at Energy Accelerator. A graduate from Dartmouth College, Andrew lives in Burlingame, CA with his wife and three children. When he's not helping to build early stage companies, Andrew builds wooden boats and furniture. Andrew was born in New York City and spent his formative years on an avocado ranch in Ojai, California.

Lolita Taub is the chief of staff at Catalyte, a 2x TEDx speaker and an AI enthusiast, with a venture capital and enterprise tech background. She is also Scout at Indie.VC, an investor at NexGen Venture Partners, an LP at Operator Collective and Portfolia’s Enterprise Fund; and a former VC at Backstage Capital and K Fund. Lolita holds over a decade of enterprise B2B software, hardware, and services sales experience at IBM, Cisco Systems and in Silicon Valley. She has a BA from the University of Southern California and an MBA from the IE Business School. Lolita has been recognized for her work on Forbes, Inc.com, The Huffington Post and Entrepreneur.com among other publications. Find her on Twitter @lolitataub. 

Jason Leder has over 20 years experience developing and launching new businesses, products, and strategic partnerships. He is currently Google’s Head of VC & Startup Partnerships (US) based in New York City. Jason works across Google to accelerate partnerships with startups’ C-Level Executives/Founders and their teams by up-leveling support, uncovering new product opportunities and generating custom partnerships.

Kate Brodock is a Founding Partner of the W Fund and CEO of Women 2.0, a global brand for gender equity and inclusion in the tech industry. Women 2.0 has catalyzed over $91m in funding to women-led startups, provided programming for women at any stage in the industry, and engaged with numerous firms and companies to promote internal diversity and inclusion. Kate is a regular speaker, appearing on stages at SXSW, 15 Seconds, Collision Conference, Fast Company's Innovation Uncensored, and Techstars. She has been featured in the Washington Post, TechCrunch, Al Jazeera, and MSNBC, and she's a contributor for Forbes.com.

Kofi Ampadu is a startup investor and advisor with previous experience as an operator, consultant, and founder. He co-founded two businesses: the first was H2Melon, a health and wellness beverage company and the second was Par, a marketplace for airline miles. Kofi currently advises and invests in consumer product and retail-related startups. He also serves on the leadership team of the Startup Leadership Program (NYC Chapter), a highly-selective six-month program for startup founders, and as a Venture Scout for Prototype Capital and Indie VC. Prior to entrepreneurship, he was a strategy consultant at Accenture.

Soraya is a General Partner and founder of Trail Mix Ventures, an early-stage investment firm focused on the "future of well-being." TMV invests in frontier health organizations, brands born online, marketplaces and design-driven technologies.

Soraya is also the host of the popular "Business Schooled - a Podcast by Synchrony," for which she travels the US interviewing founders who have made it past their startup days.

She sat on the digital advisory board of General Electric and is a current board member and trustee of The Nature Conservancy - New York and Yamba Malawi.  Soraya graduated with honors from Georgetown University and completed the Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century module at the Harvard Kennedy School. 

Sian Morson is the ultimate multi-hyphenate. Sian founded Kollective Mobile,  launched Kollective South, launched Cast Beauty, which utilized specific data points from the weather to provide users with personalized beauty product recommendations. Cast Beauty won L’Oreal’s prestigious Women in Digital award.

Sian has authored 2 books; “Learn Design for iOS” and “Design for iOS with Sketch” (Apress), and is at work on her third book: Emoji: Creating the Lexicon of Mobile Communication. Executive producer on the film “A Luv Tale” currently streaming on Amazon, she is also a producer on “A Luv Tale: The Series”. And Sian is currently executive producer on the forthcoming documentary “Raising” which tells the story of 10 of the 34 Black women who have raised over $1m in venture funding.

An LP with Backstage Capital, Sian helps provide capital for startups founded by women, people of color and LGBT founders. She is also an angel investor and advises various startups including; Partnr, Soucially Correct, and others. Sian was the first EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence) at Cross Culture Ventures and is currently a cofounder of the Starfish Accelerator.

Lisa Burton Ph.D. is the Executive Director of HearstLab, providing investment and resources for early-stage, women-led startups that innovate across media, data and technology. At the Lab, she identifies prospective startups to invest in and supports the portfolio companies in residence, including advising on data science and product. Lisa built data science teams at multiple startups before founding AdMass, a startup that leveraged social media data to help brands understand and connect with their customers online. She holds a Ph.D. and master's degree (S.M.) from MIT and B.S. from Duke, all in Mechanical Engineering. Lisa volunteers to support women in business and STEM through GirlCode, WiTNY, Girls Who Code, ELEVACAO, NYU Summer Launchpad and NUMA, and is on the Advisory Board of Duke University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science.

SC Moatti is the Managing Partner of Mighty Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and Products That Count, one of the largest and undoubtedly the most influential network of product managers in the world. Previously, she built products that billions of people use at Facebook, Nokia and Electronic Arts. Andrew Chen, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, called SC “a genius at making mobile products people love.” For more information, visit Mighty.Capital.

Milo Werner is a Partner at Ajax Strategies, where she invests in and builds portfolio companies industrializing advanced technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Before joining Ajax, Milo led operations strategy for Khosla Ventures’ highly technical hardware portfolio where she mentored founders transforming the aerospace, autonomous vehicle, robotics, and advanced materials industries. Prior to Khosla Ventures, she led engineering at Off-Grid Electric.

Earlier in her career, Milo launched four major products at Fitbit and commissioned their first fully automated manufacturing line. She spent 2007-2015 building and leading the New Product Introduction group at Tesla Motors. She sits on the board of the University of Vermont College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences and is a former president of the MIT Leaders for Global Operations Alumni association.

Priscilla joined the True Ventures team in 2015 as the first Priya Haji Fellow. During her fellowship, she worked with True portfolio company Ginger.io, a wellness platform for on-demand coaching and therapy. Following her fellowship, Priscilla joined True’s investment team and now invests at the seed stage across a variety of different sectors.

To help raise awareness about the lack of diversity in technology, Priscilla volunteers her time as a member of the data science team at All Raise. Through a series of events and awareness initiatives centered around the professional needs of women founders, the organization seeks to create gender parity across venture capital and venture-backed businesses.

Priscilla has a bachelor’s degree in economics and French from Amherst College, where she was a member of the varsity women’s lacrosse team. Outside of the office, you’ll find her taking advantage of the Californian outdoors – mostly snowboarding, surfing, and cycling. When she’s not outside, she’s cooking, building reclaimed wood furniture, or enjoying time with her family on the East Coast.

Latchkey kid from Indianapolis. Anthony Ware and his two younger brothers were raised by his dad. First gig...cleaning toilets for his dad's janitorial business.

Anthony jumped from the corporate ladder to launch startups. He ignored his scarcity mentality until it broke him in November 2010, when he had to live in a car in New Orleans after his third startup failed. Two months later, thanks to mentors and yoga teacher training, Anthony was a phoenix.

Today, Anthony’s business helps underestimated startup founders to use their mental wealth and company culture to leapfrog business norms, and create new generational wealth.

Micah currently works in the Early Stage Practice at Grasshopper Bank, a venture bank focused on supporting founders and venture funds as they full the innovation economy. He advises several startups and funds, including Tuesday Ventures, an SF-based early stage venture firm.

Previously, he founded Create33, a 22,000 sq ft innovation center for the Pacific Northwest that provides resources and access to founders to help fuel their growth. He spend 3.5 years at Amazon working with founders and designing programs to help them find customers. Prior to that, he founded or was early at several companies.

Jane is an investor at DaVita Venture Group (an independent investment vehicle of DaVita) and leads investments in health care technology, therapeutics and technology-enabled services companies. Prior to joining DaVita Venture Group, she founded a startup in the maternal health space with Children’s Hospital LA and has worked with several other early-stage health tech startups. Before that, she was a management consultant at Bain & Company’s New York office. During her time at Bain, she did an externship at Massachusetts General Hospital leading strategy, operational redesign and digital health projects. Jane has an MPH from Harvard and a Bachelor of Business Administration from the Ivey Business School in Western University.

Meghan Cross Breeden is a Partner at Amplifyher Ventures, investing in visionary Seed stage founders led by exceptional women. Previously, as the founding Managing Partner of Red Bear Angels, she built the Cornell alumni angel network of 100+ HNWI and led 25+ investments including Grokstyle [acq. Facebook], and Lyft [NASDAQ: LYFT]. As a startup operator, she was an early Director at StyleCaster, Inc (acq. She Knows Media) and a Public Relations specialist for Skype and Foursquare during their early years.

Meghan received her B.S. in Fiber Science from Cornell University and M.B.A. from Columbia Business School. She co-chairs the nextgen board of the education nonprofit Facing History.

Namrata is an early stage investor and advisor, passionate about supporting founders, especially women and underrepresented minorities. She is the Director of VentureBridge Accelerator at Carnegie Mellon and invests alongside Republic, Indie VC, and angel groups.

In previous roles, Namrata worked at an early stage industry-agnostic VC fund and an incubator in Zimbabwe supporting entrepreneurs in Southern Africa. Prior to that, she worked in product development in startups and large organizations in B2B, B2B2C, and B2C. She co-founded 3 startups, two of which she took from idea to revenue. In her spare time, she serves as an independent consultant.

She holds a BS in Biology and a diploma in Software Engineering from India, MA in Professional Writing from Carnegie Mellon, and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley.

A coffee aficionado, she loves to wake up to a good cup of coffee.

Abby is VP of Operations at LDV Capital where they invest in deep technical people building visual technology businesses. They thrive on collaborating with teams that leverage computer vision, machine learning, and AI to analyze visual data across all industries and sectors and the whole tech stack. Abby is an operator who has worked across 4 continents as a founder, a management consultant, and more. Her cloud is filled with photos of her dog, cake, and mountains.

Lisa is an Investor at FirstMark Capital, one of the largest early stage venture capital funds in New York. At FirstMark, she focuses on sourcing and evaluating new investments. She also supports FirstMark's portfolio companies as a Board Observer in HyperScience, Klara, Willow, and others. Prior to joining FirstMark, Lisa worked at two NYC-based venture-backed startups. She was a Product Manager at Handy, an online marketplace for home services (acquired by ANGI Homeservices) and worked on retention, operations, and strategy at Peloton, a fitness technology company, before it became a unicorn. Previously, Lisa was a Senior Associate Consultant at Bain & Company, where she performed due diligence for private equity firms and advised Fortune 500 companies on corporate strategy. Lisa graduated summa cum laude from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in Finance and Management. She has also served as a judge for the Penn Wharton Startup Challenge, Columbia Venture Competition, TigerLaunch, and Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC).

Harold Hughes is the Founder and CEO of BandwagonFanClub, Inc. Before starting Bandwagon, Harold spent nearly a decade in Corporate America working in the barcoding, RFID, and two-tier distribution industry. He received Bachelors degrees in both Economics (B.A.) and Political Science (B.A.) from Clemson University as well as an MBA with a focus on Supply Chain and Information Management. He is currently pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Innovation & Entrepreneurship from Stanford.

Harold is a Founder Institute graduate (2015) and led his company through the Capital Factory Accelerator (2018) and the IBM Blockchain Accelerator (2019). He takes pride in his role as a contributor and supporter in the startup ecosystem as he serves as a mentor for founders (primarily Black founders and women) while also being transparent about his founder journey.

He is an advisor to two startups: Heirlum, a social memory company creating the augmented remembrance space, and myCoffeePass, a monthly subscription-based mobile app that connects coffee lovers to local coffee shops.

Harold is also a proud angel investor, most notably with Partake Foods, the Jay-Z backed CPG company making allergy-friendly, healthy snacks and HireKanna, a marketplace and training platform for the gig economy in the cannabis industry.   

Throughout most of her career, Erin has managed a wide range of investments in venture, private equity, buyouts, and more. Most recently she was a Partner at The Yard Ventures, a venture fund focused on investing in early stage companies in the Harvard ecosystem.  At The Yard, she led the investment sourcing, diligence, and the investment process for the fund.  

Previously, she was a Senior Investment Officer at Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management (PRIM), where she managed and invested a $9B portfolio of PE and private debt investments. In this capacity, she sat on numerous boards of top VC & PE firms. Prior to PRIM, Erin was a VP at Bank of America Capital Advisors, investing across the private equity and real estate landscape. In addition, she held positions at Silicon Valley Bank in commercial finance and Citi Group in sales and trading.

Erin has an AB in Economics from Harvard with honors, where she was also an All-American lacrosse player, and an MBA from Tuck, where she was an Edward Tuck Scholar with distinction.

With a background in finance and a passion for early-stage businesses, Meha is passionate about helping entrepreneurs build companies with long-term, transformational impact. With a strong interest in digitally-enabled platforms that are disrupting large, legacy markets, she is continuously curious about new technologies and innovative service models. Meha’s previous experiences include in healthcare investment banking at Goldman Sachs and strategic finance at Zocdoc. She received a B.S. in Finance and Economics from New York University and an M.B.A from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Sol Lee is a Senior Associate at Nyca Partners, a leading fintech focused venture capital fund based in New York. Nyca invests across all stages of financial services and connects innovative companies to the global financial system. At Nyca, Sol focuses on identifying new investment opportunities as well as providing portfolio company support and building out the fund’s operations.

Most of Sol’s prior background is in the payments world. Prior to joining Nyca, Sol was on the Payments team at Uber, focusing on analytics and optimization of card, cash and wallet disbursements and collections globally. Before Uber, Sol was an at Mastercard in Strategy & Analytics, working both on the issuer and merchant side of the business.

Sol received her BBA from University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

Julia is the founder of Awesome People Ventures, an early-stage VC fund focused on improving the way we live and work. She's an active startup investor, operator, and advisor. She’s spent the past 9 years leading growth, revenue, and product teams at venture-backed companies in Silicon Valley. She’s been instrumental in launching products used by millions of users, raising over $100M in venture funding, and scaling teams to 200+ people. She was Head of Growth at Rise, the leading nutrition coaching company, which was acquired by One Medical.

Lucy Guo is a Partner and Founder of Backend Capital, an early stage venture firm that invests in brilliant engineers. She is also the former Cofounder of Scale AI ($1B), which accelerates its customers' AI development by democratizing access to intelligent data (companies using Scale include Lyft, Cruise, and nuTonomy). Before Scale AI, she was the first female product designer at Snap.

Gaurav works with Advanced Innovation at Philips Healthcare. He is interested in building intelligent systems (Human+AI) in medicine and healthcare. He works on solving problems and challenges during design and development of intelligent HealthTech for patients, provides, and payers.

Gaurav has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from University of Pittsburgh, where his dissertation was on designing interactive methods for Natural Language Processing on Clinical records. He has served a reviewer for several Biomedical Informatics conferences and journals. He is also the founder of the meditation club at Pitt and continues to teach workshops for university students.

Dr. Astrid J. Scholz is a Founder and Managing Partner of Sphaera, a system design and technology firm dedicated to co-creating global, distributed, democratic infrastructure for mobilizing data, innovations, and capital to solve today’s wicked problems. Astrid was previously President of Ecotrust, a conservation-based development organization with $150M in assets under management, where Sphaera was incubated. She is also a Senior Consultant for Uncompromise, a global strategic consulting and advisory firm. Astrid is a Founding Director and Treasurer of the XXcelerate Fund, a revolving loan fund and mentorship program created for and by women entrepreneurs that is piloting in her home state of Oregon, USA. She is also a Founding Director and Treasurer of Zebras Unite, a growing global community of founders, investors, and allies who are creating a more ethical, inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable approach to building businesses. Astrid holds degrees from the University of St. Andrews, the University of Bristol, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Reenita Das is a healthcare futurist and strategist, passionate about changing the healthcare industry. She recently got voted the top 100 women in Femtech and Healthtech. She has lived and worked in over 10 countries in the world, focusing on healthcare issues and working with public and private sector to implement growth change strategies. Das currently serves as Transformational Health Partner and Senior Vice President and is the first woman Partner at Frost & Sullivan. In addition, she is the Founder of GLOW (Growth and Innovation of Women) program. She is also on the Board of a non profit “High Tech High Heels” Silicon Valley that focuses on increasing gender diversity for STEM. She is also an entrepreneur in residence for Vonzos partners and works on helping to get the right technology to the market.

In her current role, Das manages a global business and works largely with clients on futuristic scenarios and forecasts in understanding how healthcare will operate 10 years from today. She is focused heavily on rethinking consumer business models as healthcare makes a transition to health and identifying opportunities with companies outside of healthcare to bring solutions to the healthcare sector. She is also focusing heavily on showcasing “Femtech” and the growth opportunities from this new sector which includes advising femtech companies on the right strategies and commercial business models to success.

Laurence is a French independent advisor based in Tokyo. She supports entrepreneurs in building their startup projects. She is specialized in technology-based projects and in Japan-connection support. Laurence has a unique combination of academic research and startup entrepreneurs accompaniment in life sciences. She has built strong and trust-based relationships with academic researchers, entrepreneurs, industrials, and co-investing partners. Laurence first completed her PhD at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France. She is a Microbiologist and Immunologist by training and passionate about science. She carried out 10 years of academic research in several french institutes.

Before moving to Japan, she was Partner at the VC french firm Auriga Partners and board member of the startup Exeliom Bio. She has overall 10 years experience in companies fostering emerging technologies development in seed stage healthtech startups. Laurence’s experience includes scouting, design of business development strategy, entrepreneurs support, due diligences, private equity investments (seed and series A) and board participation. She is a recognized author of peer-reviewed papers, scientific news, science teaching articles and has founded a science democratization media initiative.

In parallel to her career, she is passionate about cultural differences and Japanese culture. She is also involved in a women association in Tokyo that supports women projects and entrepreneurship

Leyla Seka is a veteran enterprise executive, nationally recognized advocate for gender equality, and reluctant venture capitalist. 

For more than 11 years, Leyla's work at Salesforce defined an industry. In multiple senior management roles she built and scaled iconic products including the AppExchange, Desk.com, and Salesforce Mobile. Leyla also pioneered Salesforce’s equal pay initiative, which led to raises for more than 10% of the women at the company. She is on the board of directors of Girls Who Code and Proofpoint.

Today, Leyla is investing in the next generation of enterprise technology as a partner at Operator Collective, a new VC fund and community designed to open the venture ecosystem to the people it needs most: tech leaders from diverse backgrounds with deep, present-day experience. Its limited partners include 100+ ultra-talented operators with decades of experience building, growing, and running the world’s most admired companies — from Zoom, Stripe, and PagerDuty to Salesforce, Slack, and beyond. Operator Collective launched its debut $45M+ fund on December 11, 2019.

Rebecca Danta is the Managing Director of Miami Angels, the largest and most active angel network in Florida, which funds Seed and Series A technology companies with early traction across various sectors.

Miami Angels has deployed $12.5M into 33 companies since 2014, and Rebecca built a sustainable, independent business model for the organization.

Prior to joining Miami Angels, Rebecca managed global campus operations for General Assembly in New York City, the first accelerated learning provider, and the "Top Most Innovative Company in Education" per Fast Company. General Assembly had a successful exit in 2018. Prior to that, Rebecca worked at Macy's in their Executive Development Program.

Rebecca is a Miami native and passionate about investing into markets and teams that are often overlooked in traditional venture capital. She serves on the board of the Florida Venture Forum, Refresh Miami, and is a Class XI member of Miami Fellows.

Pat is the co-founder and CMO of Birdie, a venture-backed consumer insights management startup that is revolutionizing how brands and retailers navigate through voice-of-consumer data to get more actionable insights in order make more informed decisions.

Partner of Arizona, a US$20 million marketing technology & solutions provider for Brazilian Fortune 100 companies, she was responsible for the company's expansion to Latin America and the development and sales of several new digital products. She is a One Young World Ambassador in Brazil, co-founder of GVAngels, an angel investor group formed by FGV alumni, and angel investor in startups of different sectors.

Pat has experience with Marketing, Product Management, and Business Development, is a judge of the MIT Innovation Awards Latam and other startup and entrepreneurship events, and a columnist in Brazilian Innovation portals. Graduated in Business Administration at FGV-EAESP and Law at USP - University of São Paulo, she also studied Growth Hacking at Growth Tribe Academy (Europe) and has experience with growth marketing, B2B sales, SaaS and e-commerce.

Dhana  is an angel investor and a product executive with deep expertise in AI/ML and digital retail. She is an industry veteran with over 15 years of experience leading product teams for startups & Fortune 500 companies. Dhana has worked extensively with wireless carriers as well as leading brands like P&G, COVERGIRL, Walmart, NBC, Toyota and Disney.

Dhana is the co-founder of Veratempo, a product marketing and data analytics company.  Prior to Veratempo, she was General Manager of New Initiatives at TripAdvisor where she led the company’s growth in the untapped consumer ticketing business. Before that, as Vice President of Partnerships at Coupons.com Incorporated (now Quotient), Dhana oversaw the company’s retail strategy and partnerships.

Ms. Pawar is a regular speaker at tech events and is a strong advocate for women in technology. She has been quoted in a wide variety of leading media outlets, including CNN, ABC News, and All Things Digital.  She has been the founding member of Silicon Valley Girls in Tech and sits on the advisory boards of the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center & OhmniLabs.

Gail is currently wearing two hats in the State of Delaware entrepreneurial ecosystem.  As Associate Director of the Horn Entrepreneurship program at the University of Delaware, she is leading the creation of a new Women's Entrepreneurship Initiative.  She is also an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Delaware Innovation Space, where she brings her operating and investing experience to assist the hard sciences startups in residence.

As employee #23 of venture capital industry disruptor, Alumni Ventures Group, she was the Founding Managing Partner of Chestnut Street Ventures and the AVG Women's Fund and AVG Social Impact Fund for which she raised nearly $20MM and invested in over 75 companies across all sectors and stages. 

In industry, she served as COO of The Bancorp Bank, the innovative banking solution provider for the most recognizable names in digital banking. She also filled executive roles at PNC, Chase, Capital One, and NCO Financial Systems. In addition, Gail headed the Payments Studies Group at the Richmond Fed and served as Board Member and Risk Committee Chair at Kompanion, Inc., one of Central Asia’s largest microfinance institutions.

Gail earned her BS in Economics, Finance and Statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.