investor

Armando Biondi is co-founder & COO of AdEspresso, acquired by Hootsuite in Feb 2017. Investor in 75 startups and AngelList Lead. Guest Contributor for Entrepreneur, FastCompany, BusinessInsider, VentureBeat. Also: 500Startups Mentor, Independent Board Member, former Radio Speaker.  

Arjun Arora is Partner at 500Startups the most active early stage venture firm in the world. Arjun is currently “In Residence” at Expa and advises funds, startups and Fortune 100 companies. He is also a Part-Time Partner with the House Fund (investing in UC Berkeley student and alum founded companies). Arjun was the Founder of ReTargeter which was acquired by Sellpoints (March 2015). Arjun was the founding CEO of ReTargeter and bootstrapped the company to be in the top 100 of Inc’s Fastest Growing Companies list in 2013. Arjun graduated from UC Berkeley with degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Entrepreneurship & Technology.

Nuno is Grishin Robotics’ Venture Partner. Grishin Robotics is a series A and B Sand Hill Rd firm focused on Smart Hardware with investments in companies such as Zume Pizza, Starship, Zipline, Spin, Yellow, Ring, eero and others. He is also the Managing Partner & Founder of Strive Capital, the San Francisco Bay area’s first quant micro-VC firm, now focused on “deep” AI and Blockchain, with investments in companies like AppAnnie, KeepSafe, Gusto and Rubrik. He has had a 22 year career in Tech as a Product Manager, Operator, Investor and Board member in the Bay area, Europe and Asia, and was previously a Senior Expert and member of the Asia-Pacific leadership team at McKinsey & Co, based in Beijing. 

Prior to joining Greylock, Seth worked as a Product Manager at Facebook where he led initiatives for the Messenger Developer Platform. He oversaw the transition from Facebook to a standalone Messaging app, managed integrations with key partners, such as Uber, Lyft and KLM, and launched the open developer platform, with over 30,000 developers. In just two years, Messenger went from 200 million users to 1 billion users.

Before Facebook, Seth worked at Goldman Sachs in New York doing tech & media investment banking. At Goldman, Seth helped take companies public, including RetailMeNot and Intelsat, worked on financings for AT&T, and helped with the sale of Tekelec to Oracle. Seth received a Bachelor of Commerce with Honors from Queen’s University.

Seth is originally from Winnipeg, Canada and is a West Coast transplant.

Harshitha directs investment research and helps shape the overall strategy of the firm. She’s particularly intrigued by the multidisciplinary nature of the blockchain space and enjoys exploring its intersection between economics, finance, and technological innovation.
Prior to Decipher, she did a stint as the CFO of an edtech startup and spent three years in the prestigious TAP program at Capital Group.
She holds a B.A. in Economics-Mathematics from Columbia University, which she completed in 3 years.

Steffen Bartschat is a member of Sand Hill Angels, one of the most active angel groups in the world. During his day job as CEO of Hill88, Steffen helps large corporates engage with the Silicon Valley ecosystem. He has held senior management positions ranging from early stage startups (Lumo BodyTech) to Fortune 50 corporations (IBM) in the consumer, automotive, and enterprise software sectors.

Steffen holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University and an M.S. in Business Management from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Ravi Mulugu is a Partner with UL Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Underwriters Laboratories. He focuses on early stage venture investments related to Cybersecurity, Autonomous Systems and Digital Manufacturing. Before joining UL Ventures, Ravi was a Principal at Next47 (Siemens Venture Capital) where he invested in growth stage startups in Smart Grid, Industrial IoT and Analytics. Ravi received a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington and an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Pavel Cherkashin, Managing Partner at Mindrock Capital and GVA Capital, VC funds based out of San Francisco, CA with more than $200M under management and the portfolio of fast-growing tech startups including Diamond Foundry, Establishment Labs (NASDAQ:ESTA), Luminar Technologies, OmniScience, Opus12, People.ai, Telegram, Vipkid, and many others. Pavel moved to Silicon Valley in 2013 from Moscow, Russia, where he started and sold 3 successful companies (Actis/Wunderman, AdWatch/Aegis, Sputnik Labs/TechnoServ). He also served as corporate executive at Adobe and Microsoft.

Michael Sidgmore is a Partner at Broadhaven Ventures, where he has led investments into Credijusto, ScaleFactor, Trizic, Nowports, Kovi, Beam Solutions, Liveoak Technologies, Starship HSA, and house of gigs. He has spent his career as a financial technology investor and entrepreneur focused on the financial infrastructure, wealth management, and specialty finance sectors. Prior to Broadhaven Ventures, he was a pre-product employee and SVP at iCapital Network, where he helped build the family office and RIA networks of the online investment platform that has over $40 billion in assets and has received over $50 million in funding from investors including BlackRock, Blackstone, and Carlyle. Prior to iCapital Network, Michael was the first sales hire and Director of Institutional Investments at Mosaic, a financing platform for solar loans that has originated over $1 billion and has received $295 million in funding from Warburg Pincus and other investors. He was formerly an investment professional with Goldman Sachs’ Principal Strategic Investments group in London, a direct investing team focused on market structure and financial technology. Michael is a Board Member of Liveoak Technologies and Starship HSA and a Board Observer and Advisor at Scalefactor, Trizic, and Credijusto. He is also the Founder and Managing Member of M4Fund and Sixth Man Capital. Michael holds a BSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics.