Max Faldin, CEO/Founder Silverbird, has decades of experience building global IT & fintech businesses. After getting his MBA at Stanford, he co-founded Russia’s largest eCommerce company, Wikimart (dubbed “the Amazon of Russia” by Silicon Valley VCs) and raised $50M+ from Tiger Global. He then switched over to work with e-commerce companies in Asia, focusing mainly on payments as a CEO, investor, and advisor to numerous startups. He started Silverbird amidst the pandemic in London, in 2020, after noticing a major banking gap in international trade: millions of underserved SMEs around Africa, Middle East, and Asian regions and beyond were exposed to high fees, unfair rejections, unnecessary paperwork, and outdated regulations. The key pain point was high-value cross-border transactions – something international trade is all about. Silverbird makes cross-border banking business-friendly and international payments borderless, limitless, frictionless and affordable. It can onboard companies traditional banks can’t through the use of AI and data-driven KYC which analyzes publicly open customs and supply chain data to assess the risk-profile of a particular SME.
Palo Alto
Michael Fanfant, General Partner Runa Capital
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.
Ramneek Gupta, Founder/Managing Partner PruVen Capital
Ramneek is the Founder and Managing Partner of PruVen Capital, an independent, returns driven firm created in partnership with Prudential Financial as the single limited partner. Our first fund is a $300M multi stage investment vehicle designed to focus on verticals including Insurance, Financial Services, Healthcare IT/Tech/Data, Real estate/Proptech, Asset/Wealth Management and Enterprise IT. Prior to founding PruVen, Ramneek was the Co-founder of the venture investing efforts at Citi. At Citi Ventures, he led investments in over 25 companies across fintech & digital commerce space that represent over $180B in market value. Some of his notable investments included Square (NYSE: SQ), Jet.com (Acq by Walmart for $3.3B), DocuSign (NASDAQ: DOCU), Honey (Acq by Paypal for $4B), Grab (NYSE: GRAB), Datarobot, Feedzai, Homelight & Zum. Prior to Citi Ventures, Ramneek was a partner at Battery Ventures, where he led the build out of their investment practice in India and before that he held various product development roles at PMC Sierra and TiVo. He is also an angel investor and has had the opportunity to partner with founders thru early investments in companies like Robinhood (NASDAQ: Hood), CheckR, Ipsy, Vicarious, Maxxa and Gridspace. Ramneek received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, where he graduated at the top of his class and an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.
