Masterclass Live: How We Identify Breakthrough Female Founders

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 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.

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.

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.

Shivani worked at Alumni Ventures from July 2024 to September 2025. Shivani Singh’s investment experience spans a range of sectors, including enterprise software, defense tech, and healthcare, where she has invested across growth and early-stage opportunities. Previously, Shivani was a Senior Product Manager at Google, where she led key product initiatives across Google Cloud, Google Meet, and the Google Pixel teams, including the launch of Google Meet for Enterprise during the COVID-19 pandemic. Shivani holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Stacey Tsai has over 15 years of experience in finance. Prior to joining Alumni Ventures, she advised global families and executives on asset allocation and investment strategies. Stacey is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She received her MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and her MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School. She was also a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Singapore.