Michael Fanfant is a Palo Alto-based General Partner at Runa Capital. He looks for early stage startups with solutions across B2B SaaS and regulated industries like fintech, edutech and digital health. Michael joined Runa in 2017 after co-founding Octane Lending, where he was also COO. He serves on the board of Octane Lending, which was valued at more than $900 million during its Series D round in 2021.
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Shuo Chen, General Partner IOVC
Shuo Chen is a General Partner at IOVC, where she focuses on early stage venture investments in Silicon Valley with a focus on future of work and enterprise/SaaS. She is also Faculty at UC Berkeley and Singularity University. Shuo is appointed by California Governor Gavin Newson to serve as 1 of 13 voting members on California’s Mental Health Commission (as the first Asian American Commissioner), which includes overseeing ~$2.6 billion annually in state budget and advising the Governor or the Legislature on mental health policy.In her venture role, Shuo has invested in companies now acquired by Goldman Sachs, Ford, Caterpillar, Binance and Dialpad, as well as now unicorns including Boom, Checkr, Grubmarket, Instacart and Rescale. She has helped portfolio companies close deals with Amazon, Apple, Google, Mercedes-Benz and NASA among others, as well as scaled portfolio companies into Europe and Asia.Prior, Shuo worked at Goldman Sachs in investment banking, where she worked with clients including Alibaba and Tencent, as well as represented the firm on the Board of Women in Finance. Before that, Shuo was at PwC, where she worked on Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola and LinkedIn’s $119 million acquisition of SlideShare. Shuo has also co-authored one of the leading books on financial regulations published by Cambridge University Press in 2019, and sits on the Advisory Board of Forbes China, where she advises on content and awards for Asian Americans in North America.
