Women Crushing It: And the Ventures They’re Running

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• Where is the transcript for this webinar?

   

  Speaker 1:
  Hi everyone. Meera Oak here, partner with Alumni Ventures. I’m really excited to be here with all of you and delve into the stories behind some of our female founders who are absolutely crushing it as the title says and really why it matters. And our intention here is to really share what it would look like to invest early in the next generation of groundbreaking companies led by visionary women. And here at Alumni Ventures, we really believe in backing female founders and that it’s not just about equity, it’s just smart investing, plain and simple, and starting at just 10,000 for new investors. We are offering the opportunity to own a stake in the future of innovation and the financial returns it could bring. But before we dive in fully, I wanted to kick things off with just some disclosures.

  And so we’re speaking today about Alumni Ventures and our views of the associated investing landscape. This presentation is for informational purposes only and is not an offer to buy or sell securities. And finally, which are only made pursuant to the formal offering documents for the fund, and you can access more information at avfunds.com/disclosures.

  Great. So maybe a bit of an introduction on myself. Before Alumni Ventures and my venture career, my journey began at Yale University and at Yale I managed about a billion in assets and led a whole series of broad-based tech implementations from ERP systems to business intelligence tooling. And having seen so much tech adoption from a large legacy enterprise, you can imagine how I really wanted to work with the early-stage ecosystem, specifically venture funds, but incubators as well, just to gain closer access to new technology and the founding teams that were really leading the charge.

  And so it was really sort of enriching for me to see sort of the tail end of the spectrum, both a 300-year-old institution like Yale, all the way to really early-stage founding teams as part of a venture studio. And it was really through this experience that I saw firsthand how capital allocation shapes industries and how it shapes opportunities. And it really reinforced my belief that investing in talent—and oftentimes overlooked talent—can really create outsized returns. Plenty of companies to sort of speak to on that, and I’m excited to get into them today.

  Awesome. So yes, I joined Alumni Ventures a little over four years ago, and my background really led me to Alumni Ventures and that belief in investing in talent just really informed my decision to join the fund, because at Alumni Ventures we’re really dedicated to making venture capital accessible to individual investors. And so since the fund’s founding in 2014, AV has raised 1.4 billion for more than 10,000 investors and have backed over 1,500 portfolio companies. So this scale has made us one of the most active VCs globally and a top 20 performer. And our team of nearly a hundred professionals operates from key hubs, really ensuring broad access to the venture ecosystem.

  Now you’ll find me today in the San Francisco Bay Area in our Menlo Park office, but I often work with my colleagues across the US in New York and Chicago and elsewhere. And I think that connectivity really is helpful and productive, and the ability to collaborate with my colleagues ensures that we all have a pulse on these thriving tech ecosystems. So really excited to be here.

  Awesome. So our trophy case—I’m really pleased to share that this unique and powerful sourcing engine, again across the US, has consistently won us access to really competitive and strong-performing companies alongside leading venture firms. And as a result, we’ve really cultivated the largest, most engaged community of investors and entrepreneurs. And that’s in part supported by our CEO services department that really drives the success of our portfolio companies.

  There are really too many awards on this page to cover them all, but one that I’ll highlight is that we were recognized as a founder-friendly investor by Inc. in 2024. And I think this award really encapsulates how much our firm has accomplished and the really high level of operational excellence, along with a strong content brand and really a world-class team. And it really highlights sort of how we’ve created a really significant moat in venture investing.

  So proud of our work here. And I know I touched on the competitive nature of deals and companies, and I think a key part of our strategy here is co-investing alongside top-tier venture firms like the names you see here—Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins—and really building off that last slide, I think this approach has really earned us our recognition as a top 20 VC per CB Insights, and it really has ensured this high-caliber deal access while leveraging the expertise of the best in the industry. So really excited that we’ve partnered with these funds and we’ll continue to do so moving forward.

  Awesome. So now into the exciting bit of the presentation, which is really about the entrepreneurs—and that’s sort of what gives us all life at the fund. So the companies that we’ll go through today, they weren’t chosen randomly. As part of our Women’s Apex 20 list, we evaluated female-led companies that are really disrupting industries and setting new standards. So the five companies and the six founders that we’ll walk through today are companies that are scaling quickly, they are disrupting new markets, they’re attracting major investors, and are building significant moats around their products. And I’m really excited to shine a light on them today. So let’s dive in.

  Awesome. Gosche Gove is the CEO of Calder, which is a company that is transforming loyalty programs into revenue streams. Now where did Goche come from? Goche is incredible for a lot of reasons, but she built really deep fintech expertise and the understanding of customer retention from her time at Robinhood, OpenSea, and SoLo. So we loved seeing that track record, and that experience really informed how she approached building Calder.

  Inspired by the Starbucks reward platform—which I’m sure, if any of the caffeine addicts out there, you probably are very familiar with—Calder is building a white-label platform that helps brands earn commissions on partner sales, while also rewarding customers automatically who come through their doors. And this is a luxury that’s generally been afforded to the giants like Starbucks, but through Calder it has been democratized to other giants like Godiva, but also smaller regional brands who are trying to build retention and stickiness with their customer base across the US. So let’s get into the company.

  Awesome. So I already gave you a little window into what Calder’s doing, but there were a lot of reasons to be excited about investing in Calder at this juncture. And I think a few of the tailwinds we really appreciated were the growing global loyalty management market and really the increasing use of AI and data to drive innovation and revenue.

  Just on that, I feel as though, again, some of the giant enterprises and brands have the workforce to incorporate AI and they have the data to incorporate AI and derive value from that moat. But smaller regional brands often don’t have that luxury—they don’t have the resources or they don’t have technical expertise. And so I think Calder is really stepping in at a really critical juncture in which people are constantly trying to think about: how do I reduce my customer acquisition cost in a sort of cost-sensitive market?

  So I think that they’re solving a really important pain point here. And the last thing I’ll add is the traction that Calder had secured at the time of our investment was quite exceptional for a seed-stage company. So we were really excited to partner here.

  But tying it back to Goche—Goche really brought hustle and credibility to the CEO seat, and we were just really excited to see Calder take on the future of customer engagement.

  Awesome. So next is Jay Graber at BlueSky. And BlueSky is likely a company that you’ve all likely heard of—and if you haven’t, definitely check them out. And they’ve really grown in prominence over the past year as one of the leading decentralized social media platforms.

  Jay Graber especially is a blockchain and open-source expert, and she was chosen by Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey to lead BlueSky within Twitter before spinning it out in 2021. And so it’s really Jay’s vision that has fueled BlueSky’s growth, which I’ll get into a little in the next slide. And she’s really positioned the company as a leading alternative to X.

  Awesome. So yeah, again, as with many of our companies, there are a lot of reasons to be excited to invest in this company. But here is one where I will sort of call out the growth that this platform has seen.

  And just to give you sort of concrete numbers here: in a three-month period, the company grew their user base from 13 million to 30 million users. So just really staggering growth and really highlighted market momentum and customer demand for this alternative.

  And then beyond that, the company has secured funding from top investors and just continues to offer a transparent and customizable alternative to other social platforms. So we are just really excited to see Blue Sky empower users to shape the future of online communication.

   

  Speaker 1:
  Awesome. So our next CEO is Kate Rosenbluth, who is the president and chief innovation officer, but former CEO of Cala Health. And Kate founded Cala to revolutionize neurological care with noninvasive bioelectronic therapies. Now what does that mean? I’ll get into it a little later.

  As an engineer and a neuroscientist, Kate really has the expertise and vision to position the company as a leader in treating essential tremor and Parkinson’s disease. So I’ll get into a little bit more of the product at Cala next.

  Awesome. So Cala Health is offering neurological care with an FDA-cleared, non-invasive bioelectronic therapy for essential tremor and Parkinson’s. And when it comes to medtech, we really appreciate seeing strong intellectual property and defensibility. And that’s really what stood out to us, among other things, about Kate and what she’s doing at Cala.

  In that vein, it was great to see that Cala’s groundbreaking technology offered a drug-free alternative with a really robust patent portfolio that is also Medicare eligible. So it was not only defensible and ensuring that what they were building was proprietary, but it was also expanding patient access. So we ashiare really excited to see Cala Health lead the future of bioelectronic medicine and Kate at the helm.

  Awesome. So let’s do a bit of a pendulum swing here with our next CEO, who is Ashi Dissanayake and who is the CEO of Spaceium. And just speaking to Ashi  first, Ashi founded Spaceium to really revolutionize space travel with in-orbit refueling.

  And Ashi  has an extensive background and is an expert in propulsion and spacecraft design. Her vision and perspective really are positioning Space to build critical infrastructure for deep space exploration and just an overall scalable space economy—which, as this industry and sector booms, is going to become more and more critical.

  So just double-clicking on that and taking a step back, the space industry has faced big challenges due to the limited fuel capacity of spacecraft. This in turn restricts the range of the spacecraft, it restricts payload capabilities, and overall mission complexity. So it’s sort of restricting the TAM, so to speak.

  And Space is tackling these challenges by pioneering fully automated in-space refueling and repair stations. So think of this as gas stations along space’s superhighway.

  And beyond Ashi ’s background—which I spoke to earlier—there’s a critical market need here. Space is solving that and also has a really strong pipeline of customers, which is a really challenging feat for an early-stage company that is building in hardware. It’s just generally much more challenging to secure and show momentum on the traction side in this type of category.

  So we were really excited to partner with Ashi and see Spaceium serve as this backbone to deep space exploration.

  Awesome. So for our last company feature, I decided to wrap things up with a bang and introduce two rockstar founders from our portfolio company, Nanopath.

  And Amogha Tadimety and Alison Burklund are co-founders and co-CEOs for the company that is revolutionizing molecular diagnostics. And I love the sort of founding story of Amogha and Alison because they met one another during their PhD programs at Dartmouth and decided to start Nanopath due to their shared research interests and also passion for democratizing solutions in women’s health.

  Our team actually met Amogha and Alison for the first time during a Dartmouth pitch event, and it’s just been a pleasure to see how far this team has come. But getting into more specifically what they’re building:

  Nanopath is tackling molecular diagnostics with a rapid, amplification-free DNA and RNA testing platform. So this platform enables real-time, in-office diagnosis for women’s health.

  And much like the rest of the companies, there were so many aspects of this opportunity that made us excited and bullish. But in this case, I’ll highlight one aspect that is pretty unique to building biotech.

  The company raised $15 million, but this also includes a $4 million non-dilutive federal grant. And I call that out because we always appreciate seeing teams that are finding non-dilutive sources of funding to support operations. And overall it really highlights the capital efficiency in the long run and it shows the flexibility and the hunger that founders have for ensuring that they have the capital that they need around them without facing that dilution in the long run.

  Awesome. So just to sum up the selection process, the Women’s Apex 20 really just highlighted high-growth, female-led ventures with strong market potential. And we went through a pretty rigorous process to ensure these selections, and it really encapsulated how we champion visionary founders who are driving innovation and are fostering an inclusive ecosystem.

  So I think by creating mutual success for entrepreneurs, investors, and the future of this industry, we are seeing the fruits of our labor and this long track record that we’ve had in investing in female-led ventures.

  Awesome. And one more thing that we wanted to highlight, which is that Alumni Ventures really is striving to serve a range of accredited investors who have different motivations and needs—from the venture-curious who have maybe never invested in a venture-backed company all the way to sort of a trophy hunter who is always mining for the high-growth, moonshot opportunities.

  We want to be your partner in your journey, and we feel we have a platform of offerings that caters to everyone. So we’d really love to be your venture partner.

  And if you are interested in Alumni Ventures and more specifically our women’s fund, I really encourage you to reach out at the links provided with our team. We handle the heavy lifting, and we source these amazing companies and have the opportunity and privilege—honestly—to partner with these companies. And the hope is that you reap the benefits, right?

  So if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. This presentation will also be recorded, so feel free to share it with folks in your community—we encourage that. And that’s sort of part of our DNA and how Alumni Ventures got started. It was network-powered, and so we encourage others to follow that lead.

  So we’re really excited to sort of seize this opportunity together. But before we wrap fully, we wanted to sort of dive into some questions that we’ve been getting throughout this presentation. So let me just pull those up really quickly so we can dig in.

  The first question that we have is: How does AV ensure continued access to top-tier female-founded startups given the competitive funding landscape?

  This is such a great question and really sort of speaks to our sourcing engine. And I think there are a few aspects I’ll call out here. One is we have a team that is constantly mining the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and they approach it in different ways.

  There are some thematic focuses. So in some cases, with my background, I have a tendency to look more so at infrastructure companies and enterprise B2B companies. And so I tend to look at a certain slice of the ecosystem, and I have connectivity with operators and investors in that space, and I build a community around that vertical to ensure that I’m seeing the best companies that are coming from that space.

  But I think a really powerful engine for us is network referrals. And I think, taking a step back, we partner and build community with operators at growth tech companies and Fortune 500 companies. We build community with our founders, and we build community with our investors.

  And so those are folks who generally share opportunities with us because—and I’ll shout out our CEO services team again—our hope is to sort of add value to portfolio companies along their journey, whether it’s customer introductions, BD opportunities, hiring.

  Our hope is that by adding that value, we are building a strong reputation amongst our founders and amongst our fellow investors at other funds—that they want to seek us out as a co-investor when they’re thinking about investing in a company, or a founder is thinking about raising their round.

  So it’s part of this beautiful ecosystem that we are constantly trying to cultivate and just ensuring that we are always adding value to the portfolio and that it reaps rewards from there.

  Another arrow in the quiver that I’ll highlight is our scout program. So part of sourcing means, again, going back to referrals—getting introductions from folks who have deep expertise in certain industries or certain categories.

  And we are lucky to share that we have a scout program of these experts, many of whom are actually founders in our own portfolio. And I think that’s extra special because these are founders who—we just walked through six founders in the presentation—these are founders who have deep technical expertise.

  They are experts not only in what they’re building but in the category of what they’re building. And they’re incredibly sharp, and they’re capital-efficient. They have this amazing makeup, and we love to see our founders as scouts because that often means that their community, their peer network, share those same characteristics.

  And so they’re often fantastic referrals for us as prospective companies coming into the portfolio. So there are a lot of different ways that we source, but that’s really how I feel like we ensure continued access to top-tier female-founded startups.

  The next question I’m seeing is: What lessons have been learned from previous investments in female-led startups that shape our current investment strategy?

  Yeah, it’s a great question. I think—actually—I’ll go back to some of the examples that I shared about some of these companies that we just walked through.

  It’s really all about thinking about what worked within specific companies and finding ways to ensure that you’re seeing that play out in prospective companies.

  And what I mean by that is there are certain categories—like team, for example. I mean, you could say team for all of these companies—but finding companies that have founder-market fit, individuals who have a track record in building and scaling businesses in those spaces are really compelling stories and narratives to support in prospective companies.

  I talked through Amogha and Alison at Nanopath and Ashi at Spaceium. These are founders who had spent years building in space, in biotech, and it gave us so much confidence when we thought about backing them as part of the investment process.

  And so seeing that play out in prospective companies is really important to us.

  Another thing I’ll call out is customer demand. When we looked at Calder and we looked at Goche, seeing her track record and traction at such an early juncture was so impressive—securing really high-profile brands like Godiva but also showing connectivity in smaller regional markets.

  It just proved that she and Calder are solving a pain point that is not just a pain point—it’s a hair-on-fire problem. And so when you see that kind of dynamic play out in a prospective company, that really gives us confidence that this is going to be a market pull—that customers are really craving this solution and they’re actively seeking it out—as opposed to sort of being in the reverse position where you’re constantly educating your customer as to why they need this in their life.

  So it’s really exciting to see some of these dynamics play out, and it’s important to recognize the dynamics that have just driven success in the portfolio and to use that to inform prospective companies that come through our pipeline.

  And maybe one last question—because I know that we’re a little short on time now—maybe a bit more of a tactical one, which is: I’m interested in the Women’s Fund. Do you recommend a larger investment once, or smaller investments over time?

  Yeah, this is a great question. Many of our investors typically dedicate a steady allocation to venture capital year over year. So in our experience and amongst our investors, having exposure to time diversification really ensures that you’re capturing both the peaks and the valleys of the market.

  And what I mean by that is: you’re capturing points at which new sectors and categories are emerging, as well as valuations are low and are at a great entry point for an investment. And so time diversification ensures that you’re capturing that full breadth of the market, and I think it’s a really great way to approach your investment philosophy.

  Hopefully that’s helpful. I think that we’re at time, but thank you all so much for joining. Again, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. You have the links here, but we really hope to hear from you.

  And I think the last thing is—if you have any questions specifically about this presentation or about our founders, we also encourage that as well. We love to sort of meet new founders and find ways to deepen our relationships in the ecosystem.

  So with that, I will say goodbye—but thank you so much.