Webinar
Why Smart Money is Backing Female Founders
Join Alumni Ventures’ Laura Rippy and Charlotte Jenkins for an engaging discussion on investing in women-founded companies and the compelling opportunity they represent in today’s venture landscape.
Learn how women-led startups are outperforming their peers and why seasoned investors are increasingly focused on this high-potential category. Laura and Charlotte will explore the data behind women founders’ success, the unique market opportunities they’re addressing, and how Alumni Ventures’ Women Founders Fund identifies and backs exceptional female entrepreneurs.
This session will cover the investment thesis driving the Women Founders Fund, highlight portfolio companies making meaningful impact across sectors, and discuss why gender-diverse founding teams often deliver superior returns. You’ll gain insight into how we source, evaluate, and support women-led ventures, and what makes this investment approach both financially compelling and strategically important.
Whether you’re a current investor or exploring opportunities in venture capital, this webinar offers valuable perspective on a growing segment of the innovation economy. Reserve your seat today to learn why backing the next generation of category-defining companies led by women is both an impact-driven and financially sound investment strategy.
Why Attend?
Want to access our Women’s Syndicate startup deals to see, evaluate, and optionally invest? No cost, no commitment.
- HomeDiscover why women-founded companies represent a compelling investment opportunity with strong performance data
- HomeLearn how Alumni Ventures identifies and evaluates exceptional women-led startups across multiple sectors
- HomeGain insight into the Women Founders Fund's portfolio strategy and approach to supporting female entrepreneurs
Alumni Ventures is America’s largest venture capital firm for individual investors.
About your presenters
Laura is a leader of multiple funds at Alumni Ventures and serves on the Board. While at Alumni Ventures, she built Green D Ventures (Dartmouth-centric) to be the largest alumni fund at AV. In her expanded role, she now leads The Yard Ventures (Harvard-centric) and the Alumni Ventures Women’s Fund. In 2024, her team will launch the U.S. Strategic Tech Fund. She was a three-time CEO, Board Member, and executive in many tech startups in Boston, Seattle, and DFW. She has previous experience at Microsoft across enterprise software and founding startup teams over seven years. Laura did strategy consulting in Germany during the economic unification of West and East Germany. Laura Rippy holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an AB in Government from Dartmouth College.
Charlotte brings a founder-aligned, execution-first mindset to venture investing. At Alumni Ventures, she leverages her background as an operator to back early-stage teams building the next wave of intelligent software. She thrives in the earliest stages—where velocity matters, ambiguity is high, and momentum is earned through tight feedback loops and rapid learning.
Before joining AV, Charlotte helped build and scale startups across AI and consumer sectors. At a pre-seed AI-native company, she helped shape core strategy and operations from the ground up. At a food-tech venture, she led market expansion and launched a new business line during a high-stakes COVID pivot. These experiences shaped her belief in the power of clarity, grit, and structured iteration—the traits she now looks for and supports in founders.
Charlotte is particularly drawn to technologies that simplify complexity and empower users to act with greater intention. She seeks out products that are both behaviorally resonant and operationally sharp—and partners best with founders who value speed, depth, and grounded insight.
Fund Actively Worked On:
- Green D Ventures
- Women’s Fund
Investment Areas of Focus:
Charlotte focuses on Intent-to-Action Infrastructure—software that bridges the gap between user intent and real-world execution. Her thesis centers on Agentic AI: systems that plan, coordinate, and act on behalf of users across fragmented tools, routines, and workflows. She believes this will be the next major layer of the AI stack, transforming both enterprise operations and everyday consumer behavior.
She is particularly drawn to categories with high friction, frequent use, and low-stakes decision-making—contexts where agentic systems can build trust, drive adoption, and generate durable behavioral moats. Her work spans business software, commerce, and life infrastructure, with an eye toward AI-native platforms that prioritize outcomes over interfaces.