Your Window Into the Innovation Economy

Charlotte Jenkins and Bozhena Kulchyckyj, Senior Associates at Alumni Ventures, led a fast-moving look at the four AI consumer trends reshaping daily life — agentic commerce, ambient home AI, hyper-personalized health, and AI-powered learning — and the markets each one is set to define by 2030.

A cross-firm panel of early-stage venture investors — Glenn Borok and Ron Levin of Alumni Ventures’ Seed Fund, John Harthorne, Founder & Managing Partner of Two Lanterns Venture Partners, Gregory Raiz, General Partner at FoundersEdge, and Catherine Ouellet-Dupuis, General Partner at White Star Capital — gathered for a sharp, contrarian look at one of the most consequential debates in venture today: as AI rewrites how software gets built, sold, and used, is the B2B SaaS model that has defined a generation of returns actually heading toward extinction — or evolving into something new?

Laura Rippy, Managing Partner at Alumni Ventures, alongside Senior Partner Stacey Tsai, Senior Principal Luca Giani, Senior Associate Charlotte Jenkins, and Drew Wandzilak, Managing Partner, led an inside look at Yard Ventures — Alumni Ventures’ Harvard-affiliated venture fund — and how the team is investing across the Harvard ecosystem today.

Rob Adams, Managing Partner at Alumni Ventures, and Hilary Ncala led a deeper dive into how venture capital actually works — built for investors who already understand the basics and want a sharper view of what drives returns, risk, and access in the asset class.

Luca Giani, Senior Principal at Alumni Ventures — biotech founder, Blavatnik Fellow, and former M&A and strategy professional — led a contrarian look at why early-stage biotech is one of the most structurally mispriced corners of venture today, and why the window to capture that arbitrage may be narrower than most investors realize.

Alumni Ventures’ Keaton Nankivil led a deep dive into Bascom Ventures — the firm’s University of Wisconsin–Madison fund — and how privileged access to one of the country’s most prolific research and innovation ecosystems translates into a differentiated venture portfolio for accredited investors.

Matt Caspari, Managing Partner of Alumni Ventures’ Deep Tech Fund, led a sharp look at why deep tech has moved from venture’s hardest, slowest-moving corner to the category quietly powering its biggest outcomes — and why the next decade of venture returns will be defined by the companies solving civilization-scale technical problems.

Alumni Ventures Managing Partner Laura Rippy and Senior Principal Luca Giani explored the outsized opportunity of investing in one of the world’s most prestigious alumni networks.