Meet the 37 rising stars of the venture capital industry

Max Abram, Scale Venture Partners

Abram was recently promoted to partner at Scale Venture Partners after building a reputation for spotting companies — and entire investment themes — before they're fashionable.

In 2025, he helped build conviction inside the firm around two bets in AI agents: Tavus, which is working to make agents feel more human, and Bland, which builds AI phone agents. Scale led Series A round for both companies, and each later raised a $40 million Series B.

He's also helped shape Scale's thinking on how AI is changing the day-to-day work of lawyers. His research showed that the modern general counsel isn't looking for one-off tools as much as a "second brain" for advising the business. That view helped point Scale toward the legal software company GC AI, which raised a $60 million Series B led by Scale in November.

Sophie Beshar, Insight Partners

Beshar joined Insight Partners in 2019 and invests in high-growth software and internet companies, after stops on Google's education team, Goldman Sachs' trading floor, and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

In spring 2025, she met two MIT dropouts building Delve, a startup that helps companies collect and verify compliance evidence. Beshar says Insight could tell early on that Delve was scaling "faster than typical" for its stage, and the firm pounced. She hustled on the diligence, then boarded a last-minute flight to San Francisco and spent the week embedded with the founders. Delve later announced a $32 million Series A led by Insight at a $300 million valuation.

For Beshar, the skill that never goes out of style is curiosity, particularly as the time between major tech shifts keeps getting shorter. "The most effective investors I've observed," she says, "are those who ask follow-up questions and are comfortable admitting what they don't yet know."

Adil Bhatia, Redpoint Ventures

Bhatia joined Redpoint Ventures as vice president of growth in 2024, focused on infrastructure, AI, SaaS, and security companies. Prior to Redpoint, he was an investor at ICONIQ Growth.

The Harvard grad has invested in financial infrastructure company Parafin, robotics software startup Physical Intelligence, and AI security firm Irregular Security.

He said Redpoint has been spending more time in the space ecosystem, calling out the Series C it led for K2 Space, which builds large satellites that can operate across multiple orbits.

To be successful, Bhatia said VCs should try to build with AI themselves, including side projects or internal tools. He said he uses ChatGPT's deep research and thinking modes to brainstorm and debate the possibility of "a company becoming bigger than we would have originally imagined."

Samantha Borja, Menlo Ventures

Borja is an investor at Menlo Ventures, focusing on software-as-a-service, AI, and cloud infrastructure. She joined the firm in 2023 after two years at Boston Consulting Group.

Borja was part of the team that co-led Menlo's Series B investment in Lovable, the buzzy European vibe coding startup, at a $6.6 billion valuation.

The relationship started when she reached out to founder Anton Osika six months before the company launched, when he was working on another project, GPT Engineer.

"Over the following year, we made it a priority to stay close," Borja said. "We'd been paying attention long before the metrics became obvious. And Lovable's scale created a genuine diligence challenge: I had to build detailed models and Python scripts to understand their usage patterns, revenue profile, and how a company achieving this much in under a year could continue that trajectory at scale."

Borja says she tries to inject kindness into everything she does.

"People underestimate how important it is to just be a good person in this business," she said.

Jason Brooke, Sapphire Ventures

Brooke was recently promoted to principal at Sapphire Ventures, where he sits at the intersection of fintech, vertical software, and crypto. He's been pushing the firm to treat stablecoins as an important new area of financial services, not a buzzword.

He sourced Sapphire's investment in Rain, which helps businesses issue and manage payment cards and wallets tied to stablecoin balances — a bet that Rain could become the "foundational infrastructure layer" for stablecoin payments. Four months after the $58 million Series B, Rain announced a $250 million Series C led by Iconiq at a $1.95 billion valuation. Brooke now works with the team to support growth by making introductions to new hires and customers.

Brooke says AI is now baked into his day-to-day. Sapphire's data science team has built internal tools that flag founders and companies worth a closer look, and he also leans on ChatGPT, Claude, and NotebookLM to crank out quick industry primers.

Sudhee Chilappagari, Battery Ventures

Chilappagari is a principal at Battery Ventures and has been with the firm for roughly four-and-a-half years.

He focuses on investing in B2B SaaS companies, AI apps, and AI-enabled service businesses, including data integration startup Coefficient and Liberate, an AI voice startup in the insurance industry.

Chilappagari said the team at Battery has gone deep into voice AI in recent years and highlighted its investment in the Utah-based financial advisor startup Jump AI. Jump had just closed a seed round and wasn't actively raising capital, but Battery courted its founders with customer introductions and whiteboarded an early sales plan, which ultimately led to leading its $20 million Series A.

As an ex-enterprenuer and "product nerd," Chilappagari told BI that one of his favorite AI tools is Wispr Flow, which dictates emails, documents, and ChatGPT prompts.

Sofia Dolfe, Index Ventures

Dolfe, who hails from Sweden and earned her master's degree from the London School of Economics, joined Index Ventures in 2018. She serves as a partner and focuses on early-stage companies across Europe and the US in SaaS, AI, financial services, and gaming.

She works with mobile game studio Dream Games, subscription app builder RevenueCat, and biotech startup Cradle. A deal that stood out recently is the $250 million Series D for AI customer service company Decagon, which Index co-led in January.

Dolfe said successful investors are "deeply founder-centric" and adaptable.

"The biggest opportunities are in large, established markets where legacy incumbents still dominate, but where AI-native workflows can fundamentally change how work gets done," she said. "That kind of transformation takes patience, conviction, and a willingness to revisit assumptions alongside founders as the market evolves."

Yaz El-Baba, Emergence Capital

Before working in venture, El-Baba was a competitive athlete, serving as captain of the University of Michigan's boxing team, where he led the co-ed group to three national team titles.

El-Baba joined Emergence Capital as an associate in 2019 after working in business operations and corporate development at LinkedIn. He was promoted to partner in 2024 and has contributed to its investments in enterprise voice AI platform Bland AI, AI sales platform Unify, and product testing startup Maze.

In a saturated AI landscape, El-Baba said investors need to reimagine how they evaluate early traction.

"In 2026, there will be more 'head-fake' businesses than ever before," he said. "In today's market, many companies can go $0 to $5M in run-rate in a year. The savviest investors will discern between low and high quality revenue, and what will lead to true durability over time."

Christine Esserman, Accel

Esserman joined Accel in 2017 and is currently a partner, specializing in backing late-stage companies. Investments include cybersecurity startup Blackpoint, software development tool Linear, GoPuff, and Bumble.

Esserman told BI her work with Graphite — which helps review and merge code — stood out in 2025, culminating in its acquisition by AI coding platform Cursor in December.

"It reflected long-term thinking: recognizing that code generation and code review were coming together, and that the future of engineering would require tighter collaboration between humans and agents," she told Business Insider.

Esserman graduated from The Wharton School, and prior to Accel, worked in product and operations at a number of startups. She told BI that while AI has helped automate administrative tasks around work, like scheduling and meal planning, the core job of a venture capitalist — building relationships and forming convictions — "can't be automated."

James Flynn, Sequoia Capital

Flynn joined Sequoia in 2024 to focus on growth-stage investments. He has worked on some of the most high-profile deals at the firm, including OpenAI, Neuralink, Vanta, and ElevenLabs, which raised funding through an employee tender offer last summer, valuing the company at a $6.6 billion valuation

It was up to Flynn to convince his partners that investing at such a steep valuation would be a wise investment.

"I started digging deep into the financials that the company sent over, which were gorgeous," Flynn said, adding that he also made calls to customers of ElevenLabs and their competitors. "It became clear that we are still so early in the voice AI wave and that customers viewed ElevenLabs as the undisputed market leader."

Sequoia ended up leading the round.

"The world is noisy and fast-changing, people are busy and there are more startups than ever before," Flynn said. "To break through in venture in 2026 you desperately need a high level of agency, initiative and activation energy."

Alexa Gellman, Inspired Capital

Some internships offer more than just experience — they can shape careers. Gellman, who joined Inspired Capital in 2024 as chief of staff to the firm's founding partner Alexa von Tobel, began her career in 2012 as a summer intern for von Tobel's company LearnVest.

After interning at LearnVest, Gellman worked at BlackRock for 5 years before earning her MBA from Harvard Business School. In 2022, she joined Volition Capital as a senior associate on the firm's team overseeing internet and consumer investments, where she sourced deals like Chamberlain Coffee and Mozaic.

In 2025, Gellman supported Inspired's investment in Logiqal, a quantum computing startup, helping lead the firm's research in the space by conducting conversations with over 100 experts prior to the deal as the quantum computing industry hit a "critical inflection point," she said.

When conducting research on topics like frontier tech or AI infrastructure, Gellman leverages AI tools herself, like ChatGPT's "Deep Research" feature. "This helps me accelerate the learning curve and ask better questions earlier," Gellman said.

Maggie Gray, Shield Capital

Gray has been at national security-focused fund Shield Capital for almost three years and was promoted to vice president late last year. At Shield Capital, Grey has worked closely with portfolio companies, including Code Metal, an AI code translation startup, and has facilitated intros that have led to at least one multimillion-dollar contract.

Gray muses about investing on her blog and Shield Capital's podcast, which she helps run. She says she uses OpenAI's deep research tool to learn about new industries and spaces and leverages AI to help edit the podcast.

"To be a successful VC, you need to genuinely love learning new things and meeting new people, Gray said. "We need to constantly be learning and curious and out there learning about unknown challenges in the world."

Manmeet Gujral, CapitalG

Gujral joined Alphabet-owned CapitalG in 2021 and serves as vice president on its investment team, focused on AI, app software, and infrastructure.

Prior to his career as a VC, Gujral worked in product marketing and operations at machine learning startup Tecton, and as a consultant at Bain & Company. He graduated from Dartmouth with a dual degree in computer science and economics.

In 2025, Gujral highlighted his collaboration with the teams behind the AI building design platform Motif and robotics lab Physical Intelligence. CapitalG led the companies' Series A and B rounds, respectively.

Gujral considers himself "a voracious user of AI," with Gemini and AlphaSense being go-to research tools. He also uses Lovable to vibe code mini-apps for leisure, including one to help him and his wife select movies for date night.

Lisa Han, Lightspeed Venture Partners

Han, a former competitive figure skater, joined Lightspeed in 2022 as a partner focusing on early-stage investments in enterprise software.

Han led Lightspeed's 2025 seed investment in Thinking Machines Lab, the closely watched AI lab founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati.

"Being a successful venture capitalist in 2026 requires shedding outdated priors," Han said. "I spend significant time with founders helping them rethink company building from first principles and hire operators who are comfortable navigating ambiguity. The pace of technological change, particularly in AI, means that past playbooks decay quickly, and adaptability has become a core skill."

Feyza Haskaraman, Felicis

Haskaraman is a partner at Felicis, where she invests in AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, and applications startups. She joined the firm in late 2025 and previously worked at Menlo Ventures, Insight Partners, and McKinsey.

"Being a successful venture capitalist in 2026 means recognizing that capital is a commodity," she said.

"You need to surround yourself with the best talent. You're seeing one of the fiercest talent wars in terms of AI talent. The real differentiation is building and maintaining a trusted community. The best investors focus on building an ecosystem around founders, talent, and customers."

Lexi Henkel, Maverick Ventures

Henkel joined Maverick Ventures in 2023 and was promoted from principal to managing director in January. Before venture capital, she led finance and strategy at a healthcare startup and worked as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.

Last year, Henkel sourced and led the Series A for Prosper Health, which provides adults with autism testing and therapy, and she joined the company's board.

"Over time, I became increasingly convinced that neurodivergent adults represented a large and underserved population at the intersection of behavioral health, consumer health, and cultural shifts," she said.

Henkel said founders are increasingly selective amid an influx of capital and as products are cheaper to build. As a result, investors need to become more involved in the day-to-day grind.

In terms of AI use at Maverick, she said the team uses platforms to identify potential founders before they have even started companies, examining factors like education, previous roles, and domain expertise to forge early relationships.

Morgan Hitzig, Venrock

Hitzig is an investor at Venrock, where she invests in aerospace, defense, public safety, and AI startups.

In 2025, she led investments in Adyton, which is building logistics and operational software for the military, and in an unannounced startup aiming to change how companies manage hourly labor. Before Venrock, Hitzig served as an officer in the US Navy Reserve. She also worked in the New York Police Department's counterterrorism bureau.

"I love investing in companies solving problems you can't unsee," she said. "The world's biggest problems live in the physical economy and for all three of my recent investments, I am reminded of the problems they are solving daily whether at the airport, on the road, at a sporting event, or training for my Navy Reserve duty."

Amanda Huang, Bain Capital Ventures

Huang came to venture through the builder pipeline. She held engineering and product roles at Adobe. Now, she invests at the intersection of developer tools and AI infrastructure.

At Bain Capital Ventures, Huang sourced the firm's investment in Black Forest Labs, the German startup behind a popular tool for generating images called Flux. She argued that creative teams "care less about raw benchmarks and more about control and correctness," and she believed that Flex's tunability made it stand out in a crowded field. Black Forest Labs later raised a $300 million Series B at a $3.25 billion valuation, a validation of that thesis.

Huang's secret weapon isn't a group chat. It's a late night café. At Bain Capital Ventures, Huang launched Cafe Compute, a late-night pop-up hangout co-hosted with the AI company Cerebras that pulls in founders, developers, and researchers who co-work and trade ideas over coffee.

Nkechi Iregbulem, Hico Ventures

Iregbulem is a principal at Hico Ventures, where she backs pre-seed and seed AI and digital asset companies.

Before that, she worked at MVP Ventures, where she invested in defense tech companies Saronic and AI startup Atero, which was acquired by Crusoe in September 2025. Iregbulem holds a bachelor's degree from the University of the Pacific.

Iregbulem said Neros, which she backed at its pre-seed, "started as a scrappy FPV drone manufacturer" and has since landed major Defense Department contracts. Her goal is to "find pre-consensus opportunities within critical industries — defense, energy, aerospace, robotics — the herd arrives."

Max Kilberg, Village Global

Kilberg serves as an investment partner at the Reid Hoffman-chaired firm Village Global. Previously, he was an associate at AngelList Venture and the cofounder of a hiring marketplace startup.

The Stanford grad has sourced or led investments in AI engineering startup P-1, enterprise AI agent company Maisa, and Interaction, which is behind the AI assistant Poke.

The Interaction investment decision came two hours after meeting its founders, Kilberg told BI, and the company went on to raise multiple follow-on rounds from tier-1 investors.

Kilberg said he leads the ideation and implementation of Village's outbound sourcing strategy, which relies on an AI stack to tap promising founders outside of its network and find the best ways to connect through its team.

Ryan Koh, Iconiq

Koh is a principal at Iconiq, a multifamily office and investing firm, where he focuses on software startups.

Koh sourced Iconiq's 2025 investment in TinyFish, which is helping companies deploy autonomous agents capable of executing complex, multi-step actions across the digital landscape.

"While the 'table stakes' of showing up, building a network, and deep due diligence remain as critical as ever, I think it's increasingly important and easier for VCs to be hands-on with products," Koh said.

"I didn't come from a software engineering background, which used to be a barrier to truly 'feeling' a product's friction. Today, AI has democratized that experience."

Asher Kraut, Generational Partners

Kraut is a partner at Generational Partners, a pre-seed and seed stage firm that invests in industrial technologies. There, he's invested in Vital Lyfe, a startup working on modular water desalination systems. Kraut previously worked as a deep tech investor at Starburst Ventures.

"Capital is no longer the bottleneck," Kraut said of venture capital. "Access to exceptional people and consequential problems is. The most effective firms are deeply embedded in the talent networks that are capable of creating consequential solutions."

Shruti Kumar, Tusk Ventures

As Tusk's sole non-partner investor, Kumar leads the firm's outbound sourcing and diligence. Since joining Tusk in April 2025, the 28-year-old vice president has been hands-on with several of the firm's recent investments, including AI healthcare startup Doctronic.

She started her career at Citibank in tech investment banking and, in 2022, joined venture capital firm 01 Advisors.

"Early in my venture career, I heard a senior investor say 'founders bring people, not just funds, onto cap tables,'" Kumar said.

"Venture is ultimately a relationship and services business: the investors that I admire most, and the ones that I think will be most successful in 2026 and beyond, think like true partners and operators, working in service of founders rather than sitting above them."

Joanna Lichter, Emerson Collective

Lichter built and leads Emerson Collective's physical AI vertical, which invests in companies developing AI technology and products that operate in the real, physical world. She joined the firm in 2021.

She led the firm's investment in robotics startup Field AI, which was recently valued at about $2 billion, after first sourcing the deal in 2022. Lichter also led Emerson's investments in robotic startups Physical Intelligence and Agrippa.

"Success in VC depends on staying deeply curious," Lichter said. "There's always a new idea, team, or technology to learn from. I focus on fast-moving sectors like AI and robotics, where yesterday's assumptions may not hold tomorrow."

Lichter is also a board member of SomosVC, a nonprofit focused on empowering Latino/a venture capital investors.

Miloni Madan Presler, IVP

Madan Presler is a growth investor who started her career as a public health researcher and speaks four languages. Now a partner at IVP, she's developed a reputation for her unusually thorough diligence.

In 2025, she helped IVP invest in Laurel, which allows law and accounting firms to track time, then use those records to understand costs and set fees. The venture firm was late to the fundraising process, she says, and had to "earn our way in." Madan Presler cold-emailed the founder over a weekend and scrambled a team to research the market and Laurel's place within it.

Madan Presler said the founder later singled out the firm's financial and market diligence as the best he'd seen, and that the work influenced how he thought about the business. Laurel later announced a $100 million Series C led by Insight at a $510 million valuation.

Maya Matthews, March Venture Partners

Matthews is a senior associate at Santa Monica-based March Capital who focuses on diligence, deal execution, and operational support for enterprise AI and cloud and data infrastructure startups. She has worked closely with Together AI, a cloud platform now valued at $3.3 billion.

"I think the best investors are relentless in pursuing opportunities they believe in (cold outreach, creative deal structures, building relationships years ahead) but also maintain the intellectual humility to update their views when the data changes," Matthews said.

"In a world where capital isn't the differentiator, being able to proactively understand and respond to shifts in markets, companies, and people is what seems to separate the wheat from the chaff."

Mustafa Neemuchwala, NEA

When Neemuchwala joined NEA at age 28, he became one of the youngest partners in the firm's history. Since then, he's invested in a handful of deep-tech startups, including drone manufacturer Firestorm Labs, drone radar startup Chaos Industries, and others, from seed to Series F.

"Just like public markets, we live in a stockpicker's world in private markets where there's a lot of noise and hype chasing, but returns come from first principles, sourcing, and picking, plus really helping founders navigate the complexities of zero to one and hypergrowth in a very fast-changing world."

Meera Oak, Alumni Ventures

The youngest to make partner at Alumni Ventures at 33 years old, Oak (now 34), is focused on AI-native developer tools and infrastructure. She recently supported the firm's investment in the AI developer platform OpenHands, which raised $18.8 million in Series A funding in 2025.

"You have to be exceptional at optimizing for signal over noise," Oak said. "We have access to more information than ever, from founder networks to raw product data, open-source activity, and real-time market signals. The edge comes from quickly distilling what actually matters and filtering out everything that does not. Once you have that clarity, the rest is pure hustle."

Oak has helped build Alumni Ventures' community of founders and engineering talent, hosting gatherings from larger events with hundreds of attendees to smaller, more intimate events that connect early-career builders.

Luc Ryan-Schreiber, AlleyCorp

Ryan-Schreiber spends his days in the messy moment before a startup is even a startup. At New York venture studio AlleyCorp, he's a principal who incubates and invests across media, fintech, and international markets. Before becoming a venture capitalist, he was a senior executive at the French media company Brut, where he helped steer fundraising and expansion.

In 2025, Ryan-Schreiber, along with Michelle Parsons, Hinge's former chief product officer, built an astrocartography-focused app called Lora. He says that in six weeks, with "zero marketing spend," Lora grew a waitlist past 70,000 people and built an active Discord community.

His advice for young investors: Stop trying to be a Swiss Army knife. "A successful VC should focus on what they are good at," he said, whether that's bringing new employees into the fold or jumpstarting a go-to-market strategy. Leave the rest to other board members or investors.

Angèle Sahraoui, Slow Ventures

Sahraoui, 25, joined Slow Ventures as an investor in 2023. She's led the firm's investments into new categories in energy, defense, and industrial infrastructure.

Sahraoui supported Slow's investment in a stealth nuclear company, as well as working closely with the firm's partners on investments like The Lumber Factory and Agent AI.

Like many VCs, Sahraoui's day-to-day is "filled with conversations where the information density is extremely high," which is why she utilizes AI tools to synthesize her call transcripts and materials to streamline decision-making.

Jai Sajnani, Khosla Ventures

Sajnani joined Khosla in 2024 as one of two partners making growth-stage investments.

He's helped steer the firm's bets on Abridge, Clickhouse, Glean, Kiddom, and Omnea, which raised a $50 million Series B funding round last fall.

"What I care most about getting right is earning a founder's trust by showing up when it matters, rolling up my sleeves, and working hard for the teams we back," Sajnani said.

Kendra Schultz, Benchstrength

Benchstrength principal investor Schultz goes beyond writing checks to founders.

In 2025, she embedded herself at one of her portfolio investments Alta, an AI-powered stylist and shopping app. Prior to investing in Alta, Schultz had met the founder, Jenny Wang, before Wang had even started building the company and "knew we wanted her back," Schultz said. While working closely with Alta, Schultz helped Wang hire a chief of staff and supported early growth.

Before joining Benchstrength in 2023, Schultz got her MBA from Harvard Business School and worked at Google on the company's responsible innovation and people operations teams.

In addition to Alta, Schultz has been involved in Benchstrength's investments in procurement intelligence platform Orphic and AI-observability company Lanai.

Ishani Thakur, Hanabi Capital

Thakur, who graduated with a computer science degree from MIT in 2021, was a partner at Index Ventures before co-founding Hanabi Capital in 2024.

Thakur works with early-stage companies at the forefront of AI and spends most of her time on product strategy and technical hiring.

"The advent of AI has led to a glut of new companies, creating more competition for high-calibre talent," Thakur said. "The best companies obsess over talent, and the best VCs help their portfolio companies identify, attract, and win top talent."

Enki Toto, Salesforce Ventures

Toto is a principal at Salesforce Ventures, where she invests in startups addressing global issues such as access to education and healthcare through its Impact Fund.

This year, she led Salesforce Ventures' financial diligence of AI infrastructure and cloud computing company Crusoe, which was last valued at over $10 billion. Previously, Toto worked as a manager at Salesforce and as a deals associate at PwC.

"Unlike standard SaaS deals, Crusoe's blend of energy infrastructure and high-performance compute required a nuanced understanding of renewable investment structures, project finance, and various loan structures," she said. "I was able to bridge the gap between traditional infrastructure project finance and venture-scale growth, which was pivotal in de-risking the model for our investment committee."

Alex Yuditski, Bessemer Venture Partners

Bessemer promoted Yuditski to vice president last year, after a path that included investment banking and a reputation inside the firm for her "tireless" support of its portfolio companies.

Her marquee 2025 bet: EliseAI, which automates workflows in healthcare and housing. Yuditski says she earned the deal the slow way: building a relationship with executives over the years. That patience paid off when EliseAI announced a $250 million Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Bessemer participating. Yuditski also supports the firm's investments in Anthopric, Abridge, EvenUp, Legora, and Upwind Security, among others.

Yuditsky says success in venture still comes down to two durable edges: relationships and hustle. The best investors, she says, are the ones people trust enough to tell them the truth, "go to bat" for them in the messy moments, and lean on when things get hard.

Brian Zhan, Striker Venture Partners

After two years as a principal at CRV, Zhan joined the newly formed Striker Venture Partners in 2025 to make bold bets on the next generation of AI startups.

Zhan, who studied computer science at Northwestern University and started his career writing code at Facebook, practices what he describes as "nerdy investing."

He was part of the team that invested early in Skild AI, Dyna Robotics, Periodic Labs, and Reflection AI.

"Founders want someone who can speak their language," Misha Laskin, CEO and cofounder of Reflection AI, told Business Insider. "Brian is rare in that he's actually done the work, is incredibly well connected, and is insightful about what's happening at the frontier."

Gloria Zhang, DCM Ventures

Zhang is a power user of the AI technology she's investing in — whether that's DCM Ventures portfolio companies like OpusClip or other AI tools like ElevenLabs, Suno, or Cursor to vibe code. Using the technology helps Zhang "understand the true opportunities and bottlenecks of the tech beyond the novelty hype," she said.

In 2025, she supported DCM's investment in OpusClip, an AI video editing platform, and has been involved in the startup's growth, scale, and hiring. Zhang was also involved in the fund's deals with AI startups like Lingopal, Emochi, and BentoM.

Zhang joined DCM in 2022 and looks for "versatile founders" who have grit. She also tries to stay curious and open-minded, paying close attention to younger generations and cultural trends.

"AI has lowered the barriers to producing and distributing products across cultures," Zhang said. "I coach founders to uncover consumer insights across borders. For example, trends and behaviors in anime, idol culture, short dramas, and live streaming often initiate in Asia and are now landing big in North America."