Webinar
Women's Fund Last Call

The deadline for Women’s Fund 1 is around the corner, and the team is ready to deploy capital and build the portfolio. Watch an on-demand session with Managing Partner Laura Rippy and the team to hear about how they will continue to build a fully diversified venture portfolio.
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Post Webinar Summary
The speakers include Laura Rippy, a three-time CEO who runs the Harvard and Dartmouth funds; Sophia Jao, a partner on the Women’s Fund and the AI fund; Brittany Wade, a senior associate on the Women’s Fund and the Green D team; Stacy Si, a senior partner with Alumni Ventures; and Haley, the senior investor relations manager for the Women’s Fund. They discuss their backgrounds, their roles in the company, and the importance of investing in women-led startups. They also highlight the Women’s Fund, which aims to close the gender gap in venture capital and provide support to female founders. The minimum commitment to participate in the fund is $25,000, and the portfolio is composed of female-led, venture-backed companies diversified by stage, sector, and geography.
Alumni Ventures’ Women’s Fund is a venture capital fund dedicated to investing in women-founded and women-led startups.
During this session, we will discuss:
- HomeThe goal and structure of the fund
- HomeBenefits of diversifying into venture capital
- HomeMinimum requirements needed to invest in the fund
- HomeOpen time for questions and discussion during the call
About Alumni Ventures
Note: You must be accredited to invest in venture capital. Important disclosure information can be found at av-funds.com/disclosures.
About your presenters
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.

Senior Associate, Women's Fund
Brittney brings to her role product and operational experience from her time with enterprise and startup companies. Most recently, she worked with Trove, a Series D startup, where she led product development for the launch of Canada Goose’s first circular economy program. Brittney is a graduate of Columbia University and holds an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
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.

Partner, Women's Fund
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.

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.




