Webinar
The New PayPal Mafias: Investing in Cybersecurity's Next Family Trees
Join Alumni Ventures Partner Meera Oak for a timely and thought-provoking session: Emerging Cybersecurity Mafias
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This webinar will explore the new generation of cybersecurity founders and operators—tight-knit alumni networks from companies like CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, and Okta—who are now launching and backing the next wave of security startups. Meera will break down the signals investors look for when identifying high-potential teams and technologies in this rapidly evolving sector. You’ll gain insights into how these emerging “mafias” are shaping the future of digital defense and why they’re attracting outsized attention from top VCs.
Whether you’re an investor, technologist, or just curious about the next frontier of cybersecurity, this session will help you understand where opportunity lies. Reserve your spot today to dive into the next chapter of venture-backed cybersecurity innovation.
Why Attend?
- HomeDiscover how repeat founders and alumni networks are driving the next cybersecurity boom
- HomeLearn what traits make a cybersecurity startup investment-worthy
- HomeHear from Partner Meera Oak on how AV identifies compelling opportunities in this space
Alumni Ventures is America’s largest venture capital firm for individual investors.
About your presenter
Partner
Meera Oak invests in AI-native infrastructure redefining how software is built. She views this shift as the next cloud moment, a fundamental transition where value moves from manual execution to intelligent orchestration and simplicity. As engineering moves from direct control to higher-level automation, Meera focuses on the foundational layers of compute, data, and agents.
At the investment level, her lens prioritizes agent development infrastructure and AI-native frameworks that favor simplicity over complexity. She seeks out the operating systems for teams made up of both humans and AI agents, with a focus on orchestration, memory, and context coordination. These platforms form the backbone of the next enterprise stack, much like AWS and Salesforce did for the cloud era, by making powerful capabilities feel simple and developer-first.
Meera has built an extensive portfolio of leaders defining the modern AI infrastructure stack across agents, compute, and data. She backed OpenHands, an open source platform for cloud coding agents, and Standard Kernel, which is building a self-improving system that automatically generates and optimizes high-performance GPU kernels as core infrastructure for agentic and frontier AI workloads. Her investments also include Fundamental Research Labs for frontier model research, Atero, a GPU optimization company acquired by Crusoe, and Vamana, where she led AV’s investment in AI-native video infrastructure that makes video computable, searchable, and model-ready.
These companies reflect Meera’s broader strategy to invest in enduring platforms that re-architect critical systems. Her background leading product for cloud-based ERPs gives her the fluency to connect with developers navigating today’s platform shift. Whether backing agentic platforms or security layers, she believes the next generation of venture-scale outcomes will come from rebuilding the infrastructure that underpins the digital world.