Introduction to The Women's Fund

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 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.