TBDF Ventures LLC (TBDFV), the organizer of Beyond The Billion (BTB), is a company serving the global consortium of investors pledged to invest beyond $1bn collectively into women-founded technology companies and funds and firms that invest in them. BTB builds on the success of The Billion Dollar Fund for Women, the initial campaign co-founded by our founders. BTB is not a venture fund, an investment bank, a broker-dealer, investment clearinghouse, or an investment adviser, but rather a forum in which investors may be educated on aspects of investment and business, as well as introduced to companies for possible investment, in particular, those led by women. Each investor and allocator pledged to BTB’s mission is responsible for his or her own investment decisions, and neither TBDFV nor BTB recommends companies or financial products for investment. Participating funds may be highlighted to various institutional and other investors and managers, with the aim of catalyzing capital towards women-founded companies; but are not guaranteed allocations from any specific fund. The Founders of TBDFV and BTB may hold interests directly or indirectly in featured funds and associated companies. Information is obtained from participant funds, believed to be reliable, but is in no way guaranteed by TBDFV or BTB. No guarantee of any kind is implied or possible where projections of future conditions are attempted.
Shelly is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Beyond The Billion (launched as The Billion Dollar Fund for Women) the first and largest global consortium of venture funds pledged to invest in women-founded companies. In its first two years, Beyond The Billion’s fund partners invested over $638M into almost 800 women-founded companies, including 11 unicorns. Shelly is a successful serial entrepreneur, investor and global entrepreneurship advocate; and was honored as one of the Inaugural Forbes 50 Over 50 in Investment in 2021. She also has extensive board experience including serving for over a decade as the President of the North American Jury for the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, a Member of the Board of the Financial Alliance for Women, on the Advisory Board for Mindshift Capital, Different Funds and Global InvestHer.
She also served as the former Senior Advisor, Global Entrepreneurship Program (GEP) at the U.S. State Department, a program she expanded to almost 150 countries, under Secretary Hillary Clinton. Prior to that, she had a distinguished career in the private sector, including both corporate and entrepreneurial ventures. She served as executive head of marketing for American Express Canada and as chief marketing officer for Bank of America during a historic turn-around. Ms. Porges has also founded or co-founded six previous ventures including Scudder Weisel Capital LLC, a joint venture between Thomas Weisel Partners and Zurich Scudder Investments; and Global Payments Experts LLC. As former President of the Financial Women’s Association in San Francisco, she launched the Financial Woman of the Year event which has raised over three million dollars for women’s scholarships.
Ms. Porges is a compelling speaker who has inspired audiences globally and holds both a BS with Honors and MPS degree from Cornell University.
Award-winning American entrepreneur & investor Sarah Chen-Spellings is Co-Founder of Beyond The Billion (launched as The Billion Dollar Fund for Women), the world’s first and largest global consortium of over 100 venture funds and limited partner investors that have pledged to invest and are actively deploying beyond $1B towards women-founded companies. In under two years, partner funds in the consortium have deployed $638M into close to 800 female-founded companies, of which to date, 15 have been recognized as unicorns: from Canva to Airwallex.
In the formative years of her career in Asia, she was on the pioneer team of a corporate venture capital unit within a publicly traded Asian conglomerate, investing in later-stage biotechnology companies. Since then, she has been at the forefront of multi-million cross-border investments, structuring and executing commercialization plans with her portfolio companies. A recognized leader in gender-lens investing, she serves as a key advisor to select franchises, serving on investment committees, to further expand capital for, source, invest in, and advance women-led innovation.
Named Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and Forbes Under 30 VC, Chen-Spellings is a recognized speaker, strategist, and commentator on venture capital, startups, and women in leadership, having been featured on Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg, Der Spiegel, United Nations, et al, and hosts a top global VC podcast Billion Dollar Moves backed by the Hubspot Podcast Network. Sarah holds a Bachelor of Laws, LL.B (Hons.) from King’s College London.
Based in Zurich, Lizanne is a family office and alternative investments leader with over 20 years in financial markets investing in both alternatives and early-stage technology start-ups primarily in Europe.
She has sourced, evaluated, and managed hedge funds and early and growth-stage technology investments; with previous stints at State Street and Henderson. She has also co-invested in early-stage technology startups alongside former C-suite-level technology executives, which delivered 6 strategic exits, 1 IPO, and 5 unicorns.
Lizanne has a proven track record in developing marketing and business development platforms for asset managers, wealth managers, and start-ups strategically positioning them for funding from an extensive smart capital network. Alongside the founders of Beyond The Billion, she drives strategic partnerships for the firm. She is a CFA charterholder and graduated from the Schulich School of Business.
Riley is a seasoned content strategist with expertise in omnichannel marketing strategies across platforms, delivering brand exposure, engagement, and conversions for global brands from Kraft, Nestle, GSK among others. She currently oversees brand development for Beyond The Billion, leading the firm’s expansion strategy while also supporting the firm’s co-founder, award-winning entrepreneur & investor Sarah Chen-Spellings with her top global VC podcast, Billion Dollar Moves.
Riley is passionate about building brands, amplifying impactful voices and does so with a combination of strategic thinking and diligent execution.
Riley specialized in Psychology with a Master of Science degree from Sunway University, Malaysia.
Shravan is currently focused on data analysis for the consortium, which includes acquiring and synthesizing data, producing the “Our Next Billion Impact Report” and related content, and managing key stakeholders to ensure successful execution.
Jonathan Hera has over 12 years’ impact investment experience – domestically and within lower and middle income countries – having worked with and for government agencies, multilateral organizations, large financial institutions, venture capital and private equity funds, angel groups, enabling intermediaries (accelerators/incubators), collective impact platforms, and universities.
He has led the development of investor relations, impact reporting and investor reporting at Sarona Asset Management; investor relations, due diligence and portfolio construction and management at the Royal Bank of Canada; and most recently the investment strategy, due diligence, portfolio management and funder relationships at Grand Challenges Canada. It is here where Jonathan co-led the development of the organization’s gender strategy and its implementation throughout its investment process and entrepreneur support.
In addition, Jonathan founded and teaches an MBA course on impact investing at the Schulich School of Business. He has served on many boards and investment committees, including the London Social Value Fund, World Vision’s Origin Capital, and the Youth Social Innovation Capital Fund.
Cheryl D. Alston is the Executive Director and Chief Investment Officer of the Employees’ Retirement Fund of the City of Dallas, Texas (“ERF”), a $3.6+ billion pension plan for the City’s civilian employees. Cheryl has over twenty-five years of expertise in the financial services industry. She serves on the Board of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City and is Chair of the Finance and Investment committee. She also serves on the board of Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas, CHRISTUS Health and Torchmark Corporation. In 2018, Women Inc. Magazine selected Cheryl as one of the most influential corporate directors. In 2011, Cheryl was appointed by President Barack Obama to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) Advisory Committee and served two terms. She served as an Executive with CIGNA Retirement & Investment Services and Chase Global Services. Cheryl has an M.B.A. in Finance from the Leonard N. Stern School at New York University and a B.S. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Ms. Alston received awards from Institutional Investor magazine, D CEO Power 500 and the Dallas Power 50.
Anna Snider is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion. She is a Managing Director and Head of Due Diligence for the Chief Investment Office within Global Wealth & Investment Management (GWIM), a division of Bank of America Corporation. In this role, she is responsible for manager research across all asset classes for the wealth management businesses. She also defines and executes investment strategies focusing on impact strategy research, thought leadership and investment implementation.
Prior to this role, Anna was part of the alternative investments group where she advised clients on hedge fund and private assets portfolio construction and became head of research for externally managed alternative investment fund of funds. She was also a senior analyst in the risk management division at U.S. Trust. Anna offers many years of investment and risk analysis experience, having held positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, JP Morgan and UBS focusing on market, credit and operational risk management. She graduated from Connecticut College. She holds the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst(SM) (CAIASM) designation. Anna serves as chair of the board for High Water Women, a foundation based in NYC.
Paul Conley is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion. He is also the CEO of General Inception, a venture studio that works in concert with exceptional founders in our network to form companies around high-impact science and technology.
Paul has been a partner in early-stage venture capital firms since 2007 when he began his investing career at Paladin Capital Group, a multi-stage PE/VC firm headquartered in Washington, DC with a focus on security and defense technologies. There he founded the life-science investment practice in 2008 before heading to Silicon Valley in 2012. Example first-round investments include QuantaLife (NYSE: BIO), Twist Bioscience (NASDAQ: TWST), 10X Genomics (NASDAQ: TXG), and Inscripta. Additional practice areas where Paul has been historically active include enterprise software, MEMS semiconductors, advanced materials, and advanced computing. More recently, Paul expanded his life-science investing as a partner at Vertical Venture Partners in 2015, leading investments in healthcare delivery, medical devices, life science tools, and therapeutics. He has served on over 30 public and private company boards of directors, often taking additional responsibilities on compensation and audit committees.
As groundwork for his entry into venture capital, Paul spent 15 years in academic research, technology R&D, and start-up operating roles. After completing post-doctoral applied research in the nuclear weapons stewardship program at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2000, he was co-founder and CEO of two start-up companies. Appfluent Technologies was a pioneering player in the distributed, in-memory database systems field while BrightScale successfully commercialized chip-scale supercomputing instruction-set architectures for use in national security applications and high-definition video encoding and transcoding.
Paul earned a Ph.D. in Computational Physics and an MS in Bioengineering from UCSD, as well as an MS and BS in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the University of Virginia.
Rebekah Woo is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion.
Born and raised in Singapore, Rebekah has more than 20 years of investing and business experience, spanning across government, investment institutions and family offices. Rebekah currently is the CEO & CIO of a Singapore-based single family office which she established and invests globally across asset classes. Rebekah graduated from the UK, US and also has the CFA and CAIA professional designations. With her education and experience, Rebekah also actively contributes to the broader investment and business community by volunteering at various organisations, such as BANSEA as the Vice Chair of the Board, Singapore Institute of Directors (SID) as the Committee member for Diversity, Board Services and International Relations. Rebekah is passionate about supporting women entrepreneurs and diversity in companies.
Angela Matheny is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion.
Angela Outlaw-Matheny joined Crewcial Partners in July 2016. She is an integral part of Crewcial’s research team and works closely with the CIO to ensure internal processes are efficient while overseeing the firm’s systematic process for identifying best ideas while sourcing diverse asset manager talent.
As a Co-Relationship Manager, she ensures client portfolios and advice reflect the firm’s best thinking and account for portfolio/client interests and issues. Valuing human capital, focusing on internal diverse talent acquisition, building a training and development program, and advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion industry-wide are other areas of expertise.
Angela facilitates the constant communication and feedback loop between Crewcial and fund managers, assisting firm efforts to build a robust pipeline of this largely under-followed segment of the diverse manager marketplace. Angela believes a combination of public, private, and philanthropic capital drives meaningful impact when coordinated towards a shared systemic goal.
Prior to joining Crewcial, she spent 23 years at a financial-services law firm, 13 of which as a legal assistant in the investment management group assisting with fund document creation, Blue Sky, and SEC filings; ten years were spent working with human resources in the training and development group with a special focus on diversity and inclusion. Angela received her BA in Psychology from Bernard Baruch College and a Master of Public Affairs and Administration from the Metropolitan College of New York. She also earned a Certificate in Human Resources Management from Villanova University, which included studies in diversity and inclusion.
Brenda Chia is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion.
She is the Chief of Capital Development at Paladin Capital Group, joining the firm in 2012. She serves on the Management Team and focuses on capitalizing on growth opportunities and developing multi-faceted investor and partner relationships for deal sourcing, co-investments and exits. Brenda led the raise of Paladin’s largest fund, the $372M Cyber Fund II, which closed in May 2022, while building strategic relationships with top-tier corporations and investors to diversify Paladin’s geographic opportunities.
One of Brenda’s career highlights has been advocating for opportunities for women and minority investors. She has testified before Congress on improving participation of women and minority-owned funds in the investment industry. She is the current Board Co-Chair of The Association of Asian American Investment Managers (AAAIM), which convenes institutional capital and qualified Asian-American investors across asset classes to conduct business and build alliances. Since 2007, as the founding President, she has led AAAIM to national prominence as a DEI advocate by setting the pace, vision and fundraising for the next phase of growth, building on the network of 5,000 asset owners and managers.
Brenda has broad U.S. and international experience developing and executing business, marketing, and operational strategies for emerging and established companies. She has served as a case leader with The Boston Consulting Group and a project manager for Accenture in Asia and the U.S. Brenda has worked in Singapore, London, and Jakarta.
Brenda holds a B.S. degree in computer science, graduating at the top of her year with first class honors from the National University of Singapore, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. She is fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Bahasa Indonesia.
Carol Schwartz is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion. Carol Schwartz AO is one of Australia’s most dynamic business and community leaders with a diverse career across property, the arts, finance, investment, entrepreneurship, government and health. Carol has been recognised for her leadership via a range of honours including her 2019 appointment as an Officer of the Order of Australia, 2020 Leading Philanthropist Award by Philanthropy Australia, an Honorary Doctorate from Monash University, induction into the Australia Property Hall of Fame, and a Centenary Medal. Carol has chaired and participated in numerous listed and private company boards, and current board roles include the Reserve Bank of Australia, Trawalla Group and Chair of EQT Holdings Limited and Climate Council. Throughout her career Carol has been a passionate advocate for gender equality and women in leadership, and as Chair of the Trawalla Foundation and the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia, she has catalysed a range of initiatives to grow the critical mass of women in politics, business and the media.
Geoff Davis is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion.
Geoff Davis has dedicated his life to channeling investment capital and entrepreneurship to help people and the planet thrive. Geoff is a multi-time founder/CEO and impact investor whose teams have invested in more than 200 high-impact companies globally and lent more than $3.5bn to over 14 million small businesses worldwide. Over his career, he has sat on 20 private, nonprofit or advisory boards, and his work has helped more than 12 million families work their way out of poverty.
Additionally, Geoff serves as Board Chair of SOCAP, Board Chair of Align17, Investment Committee Member of MIT’s Solve fund, board member at Arctaris Impact Capital, and Senior Advisor at Cicero Group.
Prior to leading the Sorenson Impact Institute, Geoff was the Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Cicero Impact Capital, a global private equity firm. Before that, he led the Perpetual Education Fund where his team annually made 20,000 higher education loans and catalyzed 50,000 small businesses in 100 countries. He is the former CEO of Unitus, a global pioneer in microfinance, and a founding board member of Kiva.org and Vittana.org. Geoff also worked with Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus to launch the Grameen Foundation.
For his work, Geoff has been recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, an Entrepreneurial Thought Leader by Stanford University, Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young, and a Social Capitalist by Fast Company, among other awards.
Geoff earned a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School and a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University. He also holds certificates from Harvard Business School, Oxford, Stanford Wharton, NYU, John’s Hopkins, and the Center for Creative Leadership. He speaks English, French and Spanish.
Ginger Lew is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion.
Ms. Lew is a senior policy advisor to I Squared Capital, a $34 billion global infrastructure fund based in Miami, Florida. Ms. Lew is also an entrepreneur and was one of the co-founders and Managing Director of Cube Hydro Partners, a U.S. clean energy company based in Bethesda, Maryland. She guided the company through an expansive acquisition period and led critical regulatory and financial negotiations throughout the life cycle of the company. In October 2019, Cube Hydro was sold to Eagle Creek Renewable Energy. She is currently CEO of Three Oaks Investments, which provides consulting services to U.S. and international companies.
Previously, Ms. Lew held a number of roles in the United States government, including most recently as the White House National Economic Council Senior Counselor, where she led work on small business, financial and procurement reform policies, innovation, and commercialization policies. Ms. Lew has also served as Deputy Administrator and Chief Operating Officer at the U.S. Small Business Administration, General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Commerce, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. Ms. Lew has also served on numerous corporate and not for profit boards including the Meyer Foundation, the Smithsonian Institute, Asian Americans for Advancing Justice, and the East West Center. Ms. Lew served on the NASDAQ Listing and Hearing Review Council for ten years as a member and Co-Chair. She is the Co-Founder of the Association of Asian American Investment Managers, a trade organization that promotes diversity and inclusion in the investment industry.
For more than 30 years, APEC has served as the premier economic platform for the United States to engage our regional partners on structural issues to advance an economic and trade architecture that opens markets, promotes high standards, and promotes sustainable and inclusive growth.
Valeri Wai is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion.
Valeri is an independent Investor and Advisor. Her recent roles included strategy, financing and tactical advice in a complex takeover transaction alongside a family-run business. Valeri was previously a Vice President in the Integrated Strategies Group at GIC, a leading sovereign wealth fund. Responsibilities included identifying and developing opportunities with management teams and private owners in sponsorless direct minority investments and co-investments across the EMEA region and select emerging markets. Her mandate included finding solutions in unconventional transactions by employing a flexible investment mandate across a target’s capital structure. In the past decade, she invested in the education, financial services, consumer and TMT sectors, and backed emerging companies in the technology space. She was an early founding member of the Integrated Strategies Group in London, growing the team and portfolio to its current size.
Valeri has broad experience developing strategy approaches alongside management teams. She was recently a Board Director of the Brandtech Group, a marketing technology group, Board Observer of Inspired Education, a premium, global K-12 platform.
Her formative years were spent as a banker at Citi and Houlihan Lokey. Valeri has an LLB law degree from the London School of Economics and was called to the Bar in 2005. She is fluent in both Bahasa Malaysia and Cantonese.
Karen Wawrzaszek is a Regional Director for the Foundation & Institutional Advisors practice at Northern Trust. In her role, she partners with foundations, endowments and not-for-profit organizations to help them achieve their investment, financial, and mission-oriented goals.
Karen is a recognized thought leader and subject matter expert in philanthropy, ESG, and impact investing. She is sought out to write articles, speak on podcasts and at conferences, including Institutional Investors Forum, the UN Global People’s Summit, and the UN Ideagen’s Sustainability Conference. She serves on several boards dedicated to building more equitable education, workforce, and health care systems for women and children.
Karen is passionate about community service and serves as an Executive Committee Member and Investment Chair of the Meyer Foundation, Chairman of the Board for Teach for America DC, and a Finance Chair for Global Impact. She is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion, an organization dedicated to improving venture capital funding for women, and is also a committee member for 50/50 Women on Boards.
Karen was named a Washingtonian Top Financial Adviser in 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022 and is a graduate and featured member of Leadership Greater Washington’s Signature Program. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Finance from Wichita State University and is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional, Certified Trust and Financial Advisor (CTFA), and a Certified Exit Planning Advisor.
Rajive Keshup is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion.
Rajive is a Partner at Cathay Innovation, based out of the Singapore office.
Prior to joining Cathay, Rajive played instrumental roles in scaling a number of Southeast Asian startups. Before moving to Singapore, Rajive was a Managing Director at PwC Strategy (formerly Booz & Co.) in New York City where he led the TMT sector for the firm’s Private Equity practice. Rajive started his career at AT&T doing corporate strategy & development in Dallas, Texas. He is also a former-founder having built, scaled and successfully exited a US-based startup in the pet services space. Rajive earned an MBA from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY and a Bachelor of Science from Bentley University in Waltham, MA.
Alifia Doriwala is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion.
Alifia Doriwala is a Managing Director at RockCreek, responsible for OCIO and Multi-Asset Class portfolios. She focuses on sourcing, directing, and managing relationships with public and private investments, as well as portfolio management, asset allocation, and investment decisions.
Prior to joining RockCreek, Alifia was an Equity Arbitrage Trader at Wolverine Trading, L.P., where she was responsible for sourcing, analyzing, and modeling equity linked trades together with equity options. She started her career as an Investment Banking Analyst at Merrill Lynch and member of the Financial Sponsor Group assessing the suitability of potential targets for private equity portfolio companies.
Alifia graduated from Georgetown University, magna cum laude, with a B.A. in Economics and English and holds an MBA in Finance and Marketing from New York University’s Stern School of Business. She is a board member of the Georgetown University Global Business Initiative Advisory Board and a former Trustee and Chair of the Investment Committee at The Langley School. She is board member for the Teach for America-DC Region and Chair of the Teach for America Stewardship Committee.
Alifia is a frequent panelist and speaker at investment conferences focused on sustainable investing, diversity and alternative investments, and she supports various non-profit organizations focused on education and women’s initiatives.
Alexandra Poe is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion.
Alexandra is an experienced board member, corporate executive, private investments lawyer, and thought leader in ESG integration and ESG/impact investing. She served as President of a mutual funds Board of Trustees, led a non-profit board for 10 years, and currently sits on two Advisory Boards. She has deep experience working with institutional investors and with private and registered fund formation and governance, most recently serving as Partner at Hughes Hubbard Reed. She has a successful track record in business development, having built multi-million dollar practices at three major law firms.
As a thought leader in ESG investing, she co-created and chaired the first major impact investing conference held in New York (2013-2014), served as principal author and editor-in-chief of a book on creating ESG programs for operating and investment companies (2022), and was a leader of the ESG practice at two global law firms.
In addition to deep experience with general registered fund governance under the US Investment Company Act, she has specific experience with Audit Committee matters; use of sub advisers, third party service providers, and white label product platforms; marketing and distribution; valuation; proxy solicitation and proxy voting; adviser M&A; corporate and tax structuring; tender offers; and SEC examinations and investigations.
Carman Chan is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion.
Serial entrepreneur turned VC turned LP, Carman Chan (Women to Watch in Asian Tech by Nikkei Asian Review) now focuses on investing in Emerging Managers. In the past 20 years, after giving up the PHD offer from Imperial College London, she created three ventures of which she sold two ventures and merged one with a Taiwanese company.
She was a previous journalist, having written columns for 8 years in magazines and newspapers about the internet from SEO, internet marketing to internet business model. She is interested in brain-related research and learning techniques and have written some books in these topics and lucky enough to get into best-selling list. In 2013, she started angel investing and had a second baby at the same time. She founded Click Ventures in 2015, also a pledged fund of Beyond The Billion and did more than 40 angel investments from seed to late stage, focusing on internet mobile-related startups.
Cherie Nursalim is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion.
Cherie is Executive director of GITI Group. Cherie also serves on the International and China Advisory Boards for Columbia University and MIT Sloan School of Management respectively. A Co-Chairman of the United Nations Global Initiative SDSN-ASEAN, she also serves on the Yale Center for Environmental Law Policy, and the University of Indonesia Climate Change Center boards. She is founding trustee of China Disabled Persons Foundation Board, China’s largest foundation, and is among the founding members of the Global Philanthropic Circle.
Her philanthropic work is devoted to health, environment, social justice organisations and tri-sector collaboration. She founded her own organisation, United in Diversity, in 2003 to inspire tri sector leaders in Indonesia to collaborate, create and implement an action plan to forge a new, positive national identity for Indonesia, based on the multiple strengths of its diverse people. She frequently convenes international and education forums to galvanise leaders from all sectors to come together to dialogue and work together. She also has distributed wheelchairs, awarded scholarships and contributed to numerous disaster-relief campaigns in Indonesia and with her husband, Dr. Enki Tan, to Conservation International.
Cherie is a recipient of the Baiyulan Award from the Shanghai government and her initiatives for HIV AIDS awareness in Indonesia won awards from UNAIDS, International Labor Organisation and the Indonesian government.
Last but not least, a new Orchid species of Dendrodium was named ‘Cherie Nursalim’ in honor of her services in the founding board of ‘Gardens by the Bay’ in Singapore.
Susana is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion.
Susana Garcia-Robles is a recognized expert on entrepreneurship, high-impact investment, building diversified VC ecosystems, and an investor in startups and seed and VC funds. She is a Managing Partner at Capria Ventures.
Before joining Capria, she served as Chief Investment Officer and Gender Initiatives Coordinator at the Inter-American Development Bank. She was the leading architect of its investment strategy for early-stage funds and startups from 19990-2020. She is also a Senior Advisor, a member of the Women’s Council and a former Board member of the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America (LAVCA).
An avid supporter of ecosystems, she co-founded the Argentinean VC/PE Association/ARCAP and the Colombian VC/PE Association/Colcapital. She served on the Advisory Boards of the Brazilian VC/PE association /ABVCAP, the Board of Directors of Village Capital (2020-2023), and currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Argentinean VC/PE association/ARCAP, ForoMET, the CITES company builder/fund, the IThink VC fund, as well as in the investment committee of the Bancoldex Fund of Funds (Colombia) and the Fondo de Capital para Emprendimientos Innovadores (Peruvian Fund of Funds from COFIDE).
In 2012, she co-founded Wexchange (now housed at IDB), the first networking platform and pitch competition for LAC women STEMpreneurs, dramatically improving women’s access to funding. In 2019, she co-founded WeInvest Latam, a platform for women investors with LATAM as the central focus region.
A recognized expert on development finance innovation, Susana has analyzed and coached thousands of seed and VC funds and startup founders and invested and managed over 100 funds and many startups. She’s now transferring her knowledge and experience building the VC industry in LATAM to other places in the Global South, mainly Africa.
For her pioneering work in LATAM and efforts to make the VC industry more inclusive, she has been dubbed “the godmother of VC in LAC.” Americas Quarterly recognized her as one of the five 2020 Top Champions on Gender Equality.
Susana has master’s degrees in Philosophy and Education from the Universidad Catolica of Argentina, and in International Relations, concentrating on International Economic Policies from Columbia University.
Perry Hollowell is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion.
Perry Hollowell has over 15 years in the financial services industry and a passion for investing for profit and purpose. As the Head of Equities and Sustainable Investing at CFI Partners, he oversees public and private equity strategies aligned with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the integration of ESG best practices across all of the firm’s equity and fixed income portfolios. In his prior role as a Managing Director at Guggenheim Partners, he managed over $750 million in equity derivative strategies. While at Guggenheim, Perry was instrumental in establishing the firm’s Social Justice Initiatives Operating Committee, which seeks to invest in and support minority-owned businesses. Before Guggenheim, Perry was a Vice President and macro portfolio manager at Goldman Sachs in the firm’s internal hedge fund, Principal Strategies.
Perry has a Bachelor of Science with majors in accounting and finance from Georgetown University and a Master of Business Administration with concentrations in econometrics and statistics from The University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. He is a charterholder of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), Chartered Market Technician (CMT), Chartered Alternative Investments Analyst (CAIA), and Certified ESG Analyst (CESGA) designations. Perry also has completed the Sustainability and Climate Risk (SCR) certification and the CFA Institute Certification in ESG Investing. The World Economic Forum has recognized Perry as a Young Global Leader in 2022. He is an alumnus of the Robert Toigo Foundation Fellowship and a 40 Under 40 honoree.
Larry is a Global Advisory Council Member of Beyond The Billion.
Larry Chaityn is an expert in the development and execution of performance management and corporate acceleration strategies that help organizations achieve their financial and operational goals. He has 18 years of experience consulting in industries such as Technology/Software, Healthcare, Life Science and Manufacturing on multi-million dollar engagements.
Larry is President of the New York Tri-State Chapters of The Keiretsu Forum, the largest global private equity investment network of accredited angel investors, venture capitalists, and corporate/institutional investors. Larry is also the General Partner for UVP, a $75m Venture Capital Fund focused on technology and medical devices. He is also the Managing Director with responsibility for the day-to-day management and administration of the Partnership.
Larry is an active member in the National Association of Health Services Executives, Turnaround Management Association, and The Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Health Leaders of New York, The American College of Healthcare Executives, and the American Society for Quality’s Healthcare Division and the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce in New York City. He often speaks on topics of change, systems thinking, effective communication, and causal problem analysis.
Prior to True North Global Partners, Larry held senior management positions with the consulting practices of Cap Gemini, Ernst & Young and Oracle Corporation. Larry graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing and a Masters in Business Administration from Fairleigh Dickinson University. He has completed additional executive education programs in Management from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
