A San Francisco venture firm developed a proprietary model it calls "moneyball for venture capital."
The firm is revealing 19 exceptional female investors with a keen eye for identifying future unicorns.
Women still comprise only about 11% of investing partners at US VC firms.
Even though venture capitalists invest in tech companies, most VCs are still decidedly low-tech, relying on gut, intuition, and personal relationships to make investment decisions.
TRAC, a San Francisco-based early-stage firm cofounded by Fred Campbell, Joseph Aaron, Scott Pyne, Steve Marek, and Dick Fredericks, aims to take a more systematic approach. It developed a proprietary model it calls "Moneyball for venture capital" that uses AI to predict which early-stage startups are most likely to become unicorns, which are companies valued at more than a billion dollars.
"At TRAC, we are in the prediction business," said Aaron. "Data is our investment committee and AI is our MO. We are 100% data-driven."
Key to the model is a very small group of 261 early investors it labels "SuperForecasters," which the firm has found can predict with a remarkable degree which young companies will someday mature into unicorns.
Now, TRAC is sharing 19 exceptional female investors who its model shows are well on their way to being SuperForecasters or in the case of Stephanie Zhan, Natalie Diggins, and Shruti Gandhi, are already there.
"By following this methodology, we aim to highlight the most promising and active new women venture capital investors who are making significant impacts in the industry," Aaron said.
Growing up in Asia, Zhan learned to code by creating basic video games and later studied computer science at Stanford. She joined Sequoia Capital in 2015, where she focuses on early-stage companies. Zhan's board seats include Skild AI, which is building a AI foundation model for robotics, and Linear, a software development platform.
Natalie Diggins, angel investorNatalie Diggins
Courtesy of Natalie Diggins
Notable investments: Vitally, TypingDNA, Gryps, Atomic Jar, Une Femme Wines
Diggins wears many hats, as a technologist, founder, board member, advisor and angel investor. She is also the founder of TheArts.ai, an initiative that bridges the arts and technology. "As a hands-on operator, I invest in companies that are solving problems I deeply understand" Diggins told BI.
Xuezhao founded Basis Set, an early-stage venture firm with over half a billion under management and one of the earliest firms to focus on machine learning and automation. "I like founders with the steepest learning curve, and exceptional execution," Xuezhao told BI.
Jana Messerschmidt, Founding Partner #AngelsJana Messerschmidt
Courtesy of Jana Messerschmidt
Notable investments: Vanta, Lovevery, Ashby, Fireflies, Persona
Messerschmidt led Twitter's global strategic partnerships until 2016 and joined Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2018. She also founded #Angels in 2015, a team of experienced executive operators collaborating to make angel investments. Asked for the most important factor she looks for when deciding to write a check, Messerschmidt says: "Founder tenacity and unrelenting capacity to solve problems."
Gandhi is an AI engineer who started Array Ventures to invest in technical founders like herself who are starting enterprise companies in areas like AI, data, and cloud. Gandhi says she seeks out "agitated technical founders who have domain expertise in different stacks of an enterprise business and are raising their first round of capital."
Kirsten Connell, Octopus Ventures and Alma AngelsKirsten Connell
Connell is an angel investor at Alma Angels, which is a community of investors who have pledged to invest in female-founded startups. She also is an investor at London-based Octopus Ventures, which backs health, fintech, deep tech, consumer, and B2B software companies. Connell says she searches for '"pattern-breaking' founders who have the grit, resilience, and capability to build outlier companies."
Parthasarathy seeks out startup investments as a member of the corporate development team at software giant SAP. Previously, she was the investment director at Intel Capital. Parthasarathy says the most important thing she looks for in a company is "strength of the founding team."
Elizabeth Weil, Scribble VenturesScribble Ventures founder Elizabeth Weil
Weil founded Scribble Ventures in 2020 to back early-stage tech startups with checks up to $1.5 million. Before that, she was a partner at venture firms, including A16z and 137 Ventures, and an executive at Twitter. She's been angel investing in startups for more than a decade and has backed companies like SpaceX, Carta, Slack, and Figma.
Barber has worn many hats since the beginning of her career — as a corporate lawyer, a McKinsey consultant, a startup founder, and now an investor. She previously served as a managing director of Techstars and ran the firm's Los Angeles startup accelerator. At M13, she backs startups innovating in health, finance, work, and commerce.
Wan is the founding partner of crypto-focused Primitive Ventures, a firm that invests only its own money to promote cryptocurrency tech as "the new socioeconomic primitive." After a four-year stint at eBay, she became a full-time investor and now crypto influencer, with more than 136,000 Twitter followers.
Bendz, based in Stockholm, Sweden, invests in seed-stage companies as a general partner Cherry Ventures. Before breaking into venture capital, she was Spotify's global director of marketing for seven years. She served as a partner at Atomico before joining Cherry Ventures, and remains an Atomico advisor. She's also made more than 50 angel investments.
April Underwood, Adverb VenturesApril Underwood
April Underwood
Notable investments: Outset, Particle, Piramidal, Vanta, Color
Underwood began making startup bets while working at Twitter in the early 2010s, cofounding #ANGELS with other former female Twitter executives and making her own investments on the side. She teamed up with one of those Twitter alums, Jessica Verilli, to start Adverb Ventures with a $75 million fund in 2023. She's also on the board of directors at Zillow and Eventbrite.
Anna Palmer, Flybridge Capital PartnersAnna Palmer, general partner at Flybridge and cofounder of XFactor Ventures.
Palmer started her first company, the designer clothing donation company Fashion Project, after graduating from Harvard Law School in 2011. She went on to start and lead two other companies, including XFactor Ventures, a Boston-based venture fund focused on female founders. She was the first female general partner to join VC firm Flybridge in 2020.
Alongside three other female investors, Palmer is also a cofounder and part-owner of a new Boston soccer team in the National Women's Soccer League, which will start playing in 2026.
Carine Aagescas founded the startup accelerator AngelPad in 2010 and has invested in more than 150 startups during her time as an angel investor. She comes from the marketing world, having held director-level communications roles at two software startups before founding her own company, an e-commerce platform for buying French home accessories in the US. She's also a fine art photographer who has done solo and group exhibitions in New York and San Francisco.
Sarah Imbach played a crucial role in growing a handful of early-aughts startups that went on to be big public companies – she was a senior vice president at PayPal, COO at LinkedIn, and COO at 23andme – before moving to the investing side. She's been angel investing since 2010. In 2020, she co-founded braincandy, an online community to help readers find their next book to read.
Ellen Levy, Silicon Valley ConnectEllen Levy, Managing director of Silicon Valley Connect
Christopher Michel
Notable investments: BetterUp, Omni, Banjo, Jobr
Ellen Levy's day job is managing director of Silicon Valley Connect, an organization that facilitates relationship building between the San Francisco tech community and the rest of the world.
In addition to holding that position since 2007, Levy has made angel investments in dozens of startups and advises them. She started her career in the corporate world and has completed stints at PwC, Apple, Stanford University, and LinkedIn, where she was vice president of strategic initiatives.
Euri Kim has been writing checks for consumer startups for more than a decade, and she's the managing partner at Forerunner Ventures. Before joining Forerunner Ventures in 2021, Kim invested in growth-stage consumer and retail companies with Bain & Company.
Kim started her career in management consulting, and today she sits on the board of startups including Oura, Curology, and The Feed.
Sonali de Rycker, AccelAccel partner Sonali De Rycker
Accel
Notable investments: Spotify, BeReal, Lyst, Match
After getting her start in investment banking, Sonali de Ryker has spent the majority of her career working in VC, first at Atlas Venture and currently as a partner at Accel, which she joined in 2008. Based in London, de Rycker is interested in marketplaces, SMEs, and fintech, and she's backed startups including Spotify, BeReal, Lyst, and Match.
UK-based Nicole Junkermann founded NJF Capital in 2012 to make investments in the healthtech, fintech, foodtech, and deep tech verticals. Of the more than 40 companies the fund has invested in, 30% are unicorns. She's a career entrepreneur, having launched soccer gaming platform Winamax after graduating from college.
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