Lauren is a co-founder and Managing Partner at Acrew Capital where she invests in fintech. Among her investments, Lauren led the 2016 Series A round in Chime. Other investments include Divvy, Finix, Gusto, Kettle, La Haus, Papaya Payments, and Pie Insurance. Previously, Lauren worked in product marketing at Google leading a number of launches for GSuite, including Google Drive. Lauren began her career building tech partnerships for the Clinton Foundation in India. Lauren is a Trustee Emerita at Brown University where she served as the university’s youngest board member. Lauren was featured on the 2021 Forbes Midas Brink List.
funding
Toshi Kameoka, Head Strategy Nth America Airwallex
Toshi Kameoka manages Airwallex’s U.S. and Canada business and administrative operations as Head of Strategy, North America. Based in San Francisco, he was Airwallex’s first permanent U.S. employee and has been responsible for Airwallex’s U.S. money transmitter licensing (MTL) and financial partnership strategy in the region. Toshi has more than 15 years of experience in business strategy, corporate development, and partnerships across various sectors, including payments and fintech, commerce tech, and mobile data and analytics.
Raghu Yarlagadda, CoFounder/CEO FalconX
Raghu is the Co-founder and CEO of FalconX, one of the largest and fastest growing digital asset brokerages. He’s an engineer by background and passionate about building products that create value – leading him to become a serial entrepreneur, product leader, active investor, and board advisor to several Silicon Valley startups. Prior to FalconX, Raghu held product leadership roles in Google. He was on Sundar Pichai’s Chrome OS team and led efforts to scale Chromebooks to over $3 billion revenue for Google and its partners. He started his career at Motorola as an engineer in a team that pioneered high definition video transmission over IPstack, laying the technical foundation for many popular video streaming services such as Netflix and Youtube. Raghu holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, M.S. from University of Texas at Dallas specializing in Signal Processing & Machine Learning, and B.Tech. from Vellore Institute of Technology.
Alexandre Lazarow, Global Venture Investor Cathay Innovation
Alexandre Lazarow is a global venture capitalist and the author of Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs – from Delhi to Detroit – Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley (Harvard Business Review Press). He has invested in startups including Chime, Kin, Neon, Sidecar Health, Facily, FinAccel, ZenBusiness, Kueski, Guiabolso, Zola, Rensource, Terminal, among others. He is a Partner with Cathay Innovation, a Paris-based firm that invests across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Alex is also an adjunct professor specializing in social impact investment and entrepreneurship at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.