Brown Girls, Money Moves

Ten years ago, Lisa Mattam started ⁠Sahajan⁠ with a simple bet: that the Ayurvedic rituals her parents brought from Kerala could stand beside any clinical skincare brand on the market. This episode, recorded live in Toronto, lands on the exact week that bet pays off, with Sahajan rolling out to Sephora's Next Big Thing wall. Joining Lisa is Manica Blain of ⁠Top Knot Ventures⁠ , an early-stage...

First with Covid and again with global tariffs, cross-border shipping went from an industry footnote to a global issue overnight. Rathna Sharad saw it as a problem to solve, and she set out to do so with FlavorCloud —and Rathna sits down with us to share her journey. Joining Rathna is Mahati Sridhar from Revolution 's Rise of the Rest fund, which backed FlavorCloud back at the pre-seed stage....

The gap holding back women’s health may have been hiding in plain sight all along—and the person to find it wasn’t a doctor, but a 26-year-old entrepreneur with a background in machine learning and unanswered questions about her own body. I’m talking about Priyanka Jain, founder of Evvy —the company building the first and largest database of the vaginal microbiome, and the team behind Evvy AI, the...

What if the things you've been obsessed with since you were nine years old turned out to be the basis for a $1M business idea? That's what happened for Zehra Naqvi, founder of Lore —the AI-powered fandom search platform that already has hundreds of thousands of people on its waitlist. We're also joined by Marina Girgis of Precursor Ventures , one of their earliest believers and a pre-seed investor...

Building a peer-to-peer startup from scratch is hard—but doing it sustainably, profitably, and on your own terms? That's a different level entirely. Fresh off of winning Retail Entrepreneur of the Year, Eshita Kabra-Davies, founder of By Rotation , joins us today along with her investor, Triin Linamagi of Sie Ventures , to discuss this milestone, balancing authenticity and community with the risk...

Risk, venture capital, and the fintech landscape look fundamentally different in Silicon Valley than in South Africa, and Africa's tech ecosystem is rapidly growing. So let's learn from the pros: Thalia Pillay, alongside co-founder Carla Wilby, launched Orca to fight against emerging market fraud, and their pre-seed round for an all-women team was the largest across the continent. One of their bac...

Would you interview 1,000 prospective customers about their pain points and ideas, before launching your business? That's exactly what Kobalt Labs co-founders, Ashi Agrawal and Kalyani Ramagurdam, did. Less than two years later, they closed a $11m round, led by the former Managing Partner at YC Continuity and founder of First Harmonic , Ali Rowghani. Today, host Bhargavi Varma is joined by both As...

Welcome back to Season 2 of Brown Girls, Money Moves with Bhargavi Varma! Today, we're talking to Nitya Subramanian, the founder behind blockchain leader Para , and her investor Maya Bakhai of Spice Capital , who's also backed by the likes of Marc Andreessen and Alexis Ohanian. We're covering everything from how anyone can become an angel investor, to why democratizing access isn't...

If you believe business is about more than the bottom line—or if you need fresh faith that purpose-driven founders can commercialize real innovation—this is your new playbook.   In this truly inspiring episode, host Bhargavi Varma sits down with Founder Nivatha Balendra (Dispersa), and Investor Olga Cruz (BDC) to talk about resilience, science-driven innovation, and the power of value-aligned inve...

  In this episode, Shaherose Charania(Women 2.0, Unshackled, Nike) and Ishveen Jolly (OpenSponsorship) join host Bhargavi Varma for a conversation that embodies the core values of Brown Girl Angels: The power of paying it forward. They dive into how Sevā and giving to others influences their work and creates pathways to capital, while also sharing insight into the practices that make a strate...

In this episode Host and Founder of Brown Girl Angels , Bhargavi Varma shares insights on the true value of women-led businesses and why it’s time for more of us to take our seat at the cap table. Answering your questions, she shares her own journey into the world of angel investing and what inspired her to create a space for South Asian women to talk money, risk, and entrepreneurship. 🔗 Mentione...

  In this episode, host Bhargavi Varma is joined by Charles Hudson and Amrita Saigal to talk about conviction in venture capital and how backing founders with a mission is key to making profit. Charles demonstrates the power that comes from conviction of self and ideas; something he found in Amrita as a founder. Discover how Amrita's journey from engineering to entrepreneurship led to the cre...

Host Bhargavi Varma is joined by Suneera Madhani and Dr. Manasa Mantravadi for a powerful conversation on culture, entrepreneurship, and investment. They dive into the immigrant experience, the evolving definition of success for South Asian women and how to make that first million.  Ahimsa Home founder Dr. Manasa Mantravadi shares insights on why she treats her business’s health like a medica...

Welcome to Brown Girls, Bold Moves, hosted by Bhargavi Varma, Founder of Brown Girl Angels . Each episode, Bhargavi chats with powerhouse founders and the investors who believed in them. Whether you're building your own startup, exploring angel or venture investing, or just curious about bold women making big moves, this show is for you. Hit follow so you never miss an episode. Brown Girls Bold Mo...