Venture with Grace

Kathleen Estreich is an investing partner at Pear. Prior to Pear, she was the co-founder at MKT1 & MKT1 Capital where she invested in and advised early-stage B2B startups. MKT1 Capital invested in pre-seed thru Series A startups and helped them build their marketing team and strategy. Prior to founding MKT1, she built and led marketing and operations teams at several high-growth startups inclu...

Muralidhar Krishnaprasad is the President & CTO of Engineering at Salesforce, overseeing next-generation platforms for Agentforce, Data, MuleSoft, and Tableau. With over 25 years of industry experience, including over six years at Salesforce, Muralidhar has driven the rapid growth of Agentforce and Data Cloud. He plays a crucial role in shaping Salesforce's AI-driven future and previously held...

Rahul Vohra is the Founder and CEO of Superhuman and Rapportive, with a successful track record of investing in over 100 startups including Placer, Mercury, and ClassDojo. He has a strong background in early stage investments and product development, with expertise in software as a service (SaaS) and user experience design. Highlights of Rahul Vohra's career include founding successful compani...

Xan Wood joined Canvas in May 2024 as an Investor, focusing on artificial intelligence applications across healthcare and fintech. He brings unique insight into emerging AI technologies through his strong connections to UC Berkeley's AI ecosystem. As the writer of the weekly Built By Berkeley Newsletter, Xan has his finger on the pulse of what’s coming next. While getting his MBA at Berkeley H...

Jonathan is Co-Founder and CEO of Impart Security. Prior to founding Impart, Jonathan was the VP of Product at Signal Sciences, an application security startup that sold to Fastly for $825M. Prior to Signal Sciences, Jonathan was product lead at Edgecast Networks, a global content delivery network that sold to Verizon for over $400M. After the sale of Edgecast Networks, Jonathan served as VP of Pr...

John Wang is the CTO at Assembled, where he leads efforts to transform customer support through a unified platform blending human expertise with AI-powered efficiency. Previously, he was Co-founder and Chief Engineer at Zinc and an early engineer at Stripe. A Computer Science graduate from MIT, John’s career spans open source contributions to Ruby on Rails, applied mathematics research in fluid dy...

Krishna Subramanian is a serial tech entrepreneur, angel investor, and commentator on mobile advertising. He is best known for being the CEO and Co-Founder of Captiv8, which was acquired by Publicis Groupe, and a founding employee of BlueLithium, one of the largest online ad networks acquired by Yahoo in 2007 for $300 million, and Mobclix, a mobile ad exchange network acquired by Velti in 2010. Su...

Erik Bernhardsson is the founder and CEO of Modal, the serverless platform for AI, data and ML teams that enables deployment of generative AI models, large-scale batch jobs, and job queues with effortless scaling across thousands of CPUs and GPUs. Modal's pay-per-use model charges only for actual compute time down to the CPU cycle, eliminating idle costs while accelerating development and redu...

Çağla Kaymaz is a partner at Category where she invests in founders building transformative companies in enterprise software. Previously, she was at Citi Ventures, where she backed AI infrastructure and application startups including Datavolo (acquired by Snowflake), Galileo, Glean, Lexion (acquired by Docusign), and Norm Ai. Cagla began her career at Microsoft as a software engineer before moving...

Harris Stolzenberg is a Partner at Pear. Based in Boston, he is focused on making Pear the go-to early stage firm on the East Coast. He thrives when working alongside ambitious founders at the very earliest stages, rolling up his sleeves to help turn bold ideas into enduring companies. Harris returns to Pear as a partner after previously working at Pear as an associate. He touched many different p...

Will Lehmann is the Founder & GP at Step Function. He has spent his entire career investing in technical founders at the earliest stages. He started Step Function to give founders leverage: a fund purpose-built to help founders building infrastructure software succeed from the outset. He provides the support, domain experience & expertise that you expect from an institutional lead investor...

Clayton Petty is a Partner at Gradient. Prior to Gradient, Clayton helped build the Cyber Security practice at McKinsey & Company, advising founders, operators, and investors across the cyber ecosystem. He also worked closely with vertical software, automation, and cloud infrastructure businesses to scale their go-to-market efforts. Before McKinsey, Clayton was a software engineer and studied...

Jeff Wang is the CEO of Windsurf, where he leads product and business innovation in AI and software. He has held leadership roles at Salesforce, Cisco, Tonkean, TomoCredit, and Workplay Labs, and is also a General Partner at RNR Capital. Jeff co-founded RocketFuel Education, an education platform focused on cryptocurrencies, economics, AI, and venture capital, and is an active angel investor in mu...

Minjae Ormes is a Forbes World’s Most Influential CMO and Goldhouse A100 honoree, celebrated for building iconic brands and transformative teams at global companies including YouTube, Visible, and most recently as VP of Marketing at LinkedIn. Renowned for driving innovation in social media, the creator economy, and now AI, she leads with curiosity and courage, fostering inclusive, high-accountabil...

Arif Damji is a Partner at Conductive Ventures with deep experience in software and tech-enabled services. He focuses on achieving an efficient Go-To-Market strategy, leveraging his background in both B2B and B2C marketing and sales. Arif believes that scrappy founders deserve hands-on investors who provide practical support rather than buzzwords or generic advice. Topics: How AI is reshaping B2B...

Joanne Chen is a General Partner at Foundation Capital, where she invests in AI-first B2B applications and data platforms that power the automated enterprise. A technologist at heart who built her first webpage business at age nine, she launched her career as an engineer at Cisco before co-founding a mobile gaming company and later advising tech companies on IPOs and M&A at Jefferies, as well...

Wen Sang is the Co-Founder and COO of Genspark.ai, a Palo Alto-based AI company building agents for knowledge workers, which reached 2 million users and $36M in ARR within 45 days of launching in April 2025, securing $160M in funding and partnering with top AI labs to advance agentic work solutions. Previously, he was the founder and CEO of Smarking Inc., a Y Combinator and Khosla Ventures-backed...

Nick Evans is the Co-Founder and CEO of Avocado, a restaurant point-of-sale system integrated with an AI assistant designed to transform restaurant operations. He previously co-founded and served as CEO of Tile, a leading consumer technology company specializing in Bluetooth tracking devices, which was successfully acquired by Life360. Nick has deep technical expertise across hardware and software...

Ganesh Bell joined Insight Partners as a Managing Director to invest in and help entrepreneurs build great software & data companies that will define modern enterprise and digital business. He is a profound student of the enterprise software market and industries reimagined by data. Ganesh has over 25+ years of rare experience as a builder and operating executive across startups, high-growth s...

Sri Batchu, most recently Chief Marketing Officer at The RealReal, the leading luxury luxury resale platform in the U.S, is a seasoned leader in growth and operations, with a proven track record of scaling hyper-growth tech companies through pivotal roles at Ramp, Instacart, and Opendoor. In addition to his growth and marketing expertise, Sri is an active investor and advisor to over 50 startups....

Caroline Duffy is a Partner at Cowboy Ventures. She thrives partnering with ambitious builders reimagining existing categories or creating entirely new ones. She focuses on B2B software and AI, with a particular passion for teams modernizing overlooked, unglamorous industries burdened by outdated tech stacks. It’s never too early to reach out - she’s excited to collaborate with founders from idea...

Akankshu Dhawan is Senior Vice President of Product Management and Executive General Manager at Xero, where he leads product strategy and AI-driven innovation for small businesses. He previously held leadership roles at Uber, AppDynamics, and Microsoft, and co-founded ImaZing. With an MBA from Chicago Booth, an MS in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from UMass Dartmouth, and a B.Tech....

Alex Mashrabov is the Founder and CEO of Higgsfield AI, a leading generative video company whose personalized storytelling app quickly reached #1 in graphics on the App Store and debuted a state-of-the-art video world model in 2025. Previously, he served as Director of Generative AI at Snap Inc., leading MyAI chatbot development and GenAI AR effects for hundreds of millions of users, after Snap ac...

Kate Berardo is the Vice President of Executive Development at Meta, where she leads the company’s most strategic coaching, team, and leadership initiatives. Trusted by senior leaders to navigate their most pressing challenges, she has designed and delivered some of Meta’s most impactful leadership programs and learning products. With a proven track record of building and scaling teams, practice a...

Andrew Chau is the co-founder and CEO of Boba Guys Inc., the revolutionary bubble tea company that has fundamentally changed how people view boba and tea culture in America. Starting from a shared passion for quality milk tea and a mission to elevate the boba experience with fresh, premium ingredients, Andrew and co-founder Bin Chen launched Boba Guys in 2011. What began as a single San Francisco...