Webinar
Women's Fund 3 Intro
Join Alumni Ventures’ Charlotte Jenkins, Evy Chen, Laura Rippy, Meera Oak, and Sophia Zhao for an introduction to the Women Founders Fund, our fund focused on backing exceptional women-led companies across all sectors.
In this session, Keaton and Mike will provide a comprehensive overview of Bascom Ventures’ investment strategy and how the fund leverages unique access to one of the nation’s premier public research universities. They’ll discuss what makes the University of Wisconsin-Madison innovation ecosystem a compelling source of venture opportunities, from its world-class research programs and engineering excellence to its strong alumni network and entrepreneurial culture.
The conversation will cover how Bascom Ventures identifies and evaluates promising startups connected to the UW-Madison community, highlight portfolio companies across various sectors, and explore the broader venture landscape in Wisconsin and the Midwest. You’ll gain insight into the fund’s investment approach, deal sourcing advantages, and why university-connected venture investing represents an attractive opportunity for building a diversified portfolio.
Whether you’re a current investor or exploring opportunities in venture capital, this webinar offers valuable perspective on how Bascom Ventures taps into a thriving innovation ecosystem. Reserve your seat today to learn how we back leading companies and founders connected to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Badger network.
Want to access our Women’s Syndicate startup deals to see, evaluate, and optionally invest? No cost, no commitment.
Why Attend?
- HomeDiscover why women-founded companies represent a compelling investment opportunity backed by strong performance data
- HomeLearn how the Women Founders Fund identifies and evaluates exceptional women-led startups across multiple sectors
- HomeUnderstand the fund's investment approach and why gender-diverse founding teams drive superior outcomes
Alumni Ventures is America’s largest venture capital firm for individual investors.
About your presenters
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.
Overview:
Evy brings a cross-disciplinary lens to early-stage investing, grounded in her experience as a founder, entrepreneur, and behavioral communications strategist. Her investment philosophy blends creative systems thinking with operational rigor, shaped by a career spanning startups, global markets, and behavioral economics.
At Alumni Ventures, Evy is a Principal on the Castor Ventures team, where she leads investments in consumer-facing technologies that drive behavior change. Her focus areas include neurotechnology, consumer AI, and next-generation commerce. She also plays an active role in Alumni Ventures’ Syndications, leveraging her founder mindset and strategic storytelling background to identify and support high-potential companies.
Funds actively worked on:
Castor Ventures
Women’s Fund
Syndications
Investment Areas of Focus:
Evy’s investment thesis is rooted in the belief that compelling, economically sound storytelling is central to unlocking market behavior and generating durable returns. She gravitates toward founders at the intersection of technology and human behavior—those reimagining how consumers interact, decide, and evolve with products and platforms.
Her unique approach is informed by her founding journey: she launched and scaled Evy Tea, a pioneering cold brew brand distributed nationally, and later founded Nudge Venture, a behavioral economics research studio focused on applied strategy. Recognized by outlets like the BBC and Forbes, her work exemplifies a blend of commercial instinct and narrative insight.
Having lived and worked across three continents, Evy brings a global perspective to her venture practice. She is a Sloan Fellow and holds an MS in Management of Technology from MIT, as well as a BS in Marketing Communications from Emerson College. She believes the most transformative consumer companies will not only drive transactions, but shape the way people think, act, and connect.
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.
Partner, Women's Fund
Meera’s background includes strategic, financial, and operational experience from her time at Yale University, where she managed a $1B budget (of a $4B organization), led M&A transactions, and secured business development relationships with corporate partners. Most recently, she worked with early-stage venture funds and incubators like Create Venture Studio and Polymath Capital Partners and was responsible for launching business ventures and sourcing investments in enterprise SaaS, infrastructure, and ecommerce. Meera has a BA in Economics from Swarthmore College and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
Sophia brings a wealth of experience in capital advisory, corporate development, and operational optimization, establishing impactful collaborations with CXOs and Founders. With a diverse industry exposure encompassing cloud computing, mining and minerals, consumer goods, and Web3, Sophia has been at the forefront of transformative technologies. Since 2018, she has been immersed in the crypto universe, working at Galaxy Digital, Huobi US, and Crypto.com. In these roles, Sophia engaged with startups and institutional clients on capital raising and trading across the Americas, EU, and Asia regions.
Actively fostering innovation and mentorship, Sophia serves as a mentor and judge at prestigious institutions such as Yale’s Tsai City for Innovation, Berkeley’s Blockchain Xcelerator, Techstars, and Layer 1 protocols, including Ethereum, Algorand, and Solana. She maintains close ties with the blockchain communities at Stanford and Yale.
Driven by a passion for shaping the future through frontier technologies, Sophia is currently supporting AI data and applications deals within her team. She holds a BBA from Simon Fraser University, an MBA from the University of British Columbia, and an MAM from the Yale School of Management.