Green D Ventures Perspective on Investing Trends in 2021

Overview:

Laura Rippy is a Managing Partner and Board Member at Alumni Ventures. She runs the Harvard-focused fund (The Yard Ventures), the Dartmouth-focused fund (Green D Ventures), the Women’s Fund at Alumni Ventures, and helps our US Strategic Tech fund. Alumni Ventures is “America’s Largest Venture Firm for Individuals” with $1.5B raised, and 1500 portfolio companies. AV is one of the top 3 most active venture capital firms globally, per Pitchbook 2018-24.

Previously, Laura was a serial CEO, Chairman, Board Member, Advisor, and Executive in high-technology companies including Microsoft. Business Insider ranked Laura in the Best Early Stage Investors of 2024 and 2025.

Laura Rippy holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an AB in Government from Dartmouth College.

Funds Actively Worked On:

• Yard Ventures
• Green D Ventures
• Women’s Fund
• US Strategic Tech Fund

Investment Lens:

Laura’s investing areas at AV leverage her operating experience in consumer internet, enterprise software, and novel technology innovations. She is inspired by founders aiming to build “N of 1” companies, ideally with IP or other moats. Business Insider ranked Rippy in the Top 100 Early Stage Investors of 2024 and 2025, and #1 in the Top Female Seed Investors of 2025.

Dean is Division Director, Corporate Development Joint Ventures and Acquisitions, at BAYADA Home Health Care. Previously, he was a Senior Principal at Green D Ventures, where he focused on deal sourcing, investment diligence, and portfolio management. Prior to Green D, Dean worked at Touchdown Ventures, where he helped lead a corporate venture capital fund for a health system in the southeastern U.S. His experience spans investment banking, venture capital, and military service as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Navy. Dean holds an AB in government from Dartmouth, an MBA in health care management from Wharton, and an MD from the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

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.

Darrin is an investment professional with an extensive background in financial services and B2B. Throughout his 25 year career, he has worked with individual investors, investment advisors and their clients, and institutional (foundations and endowments) clients, with various investment vehicles including mutual funds, separately managed accounts, socially responsible portfolios, and alternative investments. He earned a BA in Economics & Public Management from UMaine and an MBA from Boston College.