What are Rising Stars most excited about in 2025?

What are Rising Stars most excited about in 2025?

Bukie Adeno Umeano
Principal, Anthemis

Given Anthemis’s focus on fintech investments, Umeano is excited by innovation across the financial services space. “The amount of new solutions that we see on a regular basis is great,” she says. “Thinking through where it makes sense to make an investment and actually getting that deal over the line – that is extremely energizing. And I think it’s going to be an extremely active year.”

In risk management, she sees compliance automation being applied to a wide variety of manual workflows, including testing and manual review processes, that can be approached in myriad ways.

“There are so many different industries that have their own unique struggles when it comes to compliance,” she notes. “There’s marketing communications in financial services that have very strict regulations. There’s also compliance in things like mortgages and the way you underwrite loans. We’re spending time looking into all the different niches.”

In payments platforms, Umeano sees more attention going toward facilitating more efficient, cheaper cross-border payments. She expects to see extensive innovation in cross-border payments in the next few years because the tools being used to verify these transactions are getting more sophisticated, and there is increased use of stablecoins to help move money across borders more securely.

Umeano is also excited about moving from purely embedded finance into a world of invisible finance. “The difference between [the two] is the ability to hyper-personalize and automate,” she says. “That’s what takes it from one level to the next.”

Amanda Eakin
Principal, Sputnik ATX

One of the drivers of Eakin’s work at Sputnik ATX, and in the larger venture community, is her commitment to expanding opportunities for underrepresented groups. This year, she wants to boost the number of women and Latino founders who apply to Sputnik’s accelerator program.

Although Sputnix doesn’t have a mandate around diversity, it’s important to the firm that “people in different communities know about us, so when they think of getting their first check, they think of Sputnik,” she says. “My goal is to continue being intentional about showing up in the spaces where we want our presentation, so that’s going to be more women and Latino founder-related events.”

One way Eakin does that is by supporting a program called Founded in Texas, which is held during Austin’s annual South by Southwest festival. Organized by Project W, the Hearst Fund and the Artemis Fund, all of which focus on women founders, Founded in Texas offers women feedback on their pitches and advice on accessing investors. Eakin helped organize the program’s launch event in Houston, for which Sputnik served as a sponsor.

One result was that Sputnik met the founders of a company that ended up being accepted into its most recent accelerator cohort.

Last year, Eakin organized a panel around Google Women Techmakers for SXSW, and she looks forward to doing so again this year.

Erica Amatori
Senior VP of platform, Left Lane Capital

Amatori is excited by the shift she sees underway in how VC firms think about platform services, which until now have been focused on post-investment growth.

“Our commitment to companies starts before the term sheet, starts before the ink dries even,” she tells Venture Capital Journal. “Platform should help win deals, not just grow deals.

“You have two VC firms competing on a deal. One of them says, ‘We have this amazing platform team that’s going to plug in after we invest in you.’ The other introduces you to an in-house VP of talent, an in-house network individual, an in-house growth marketing director that will help grow your business and provide automatic value before the term sheet’s even signed. They’re obviously going to pick that VC firm where they have an extension of their team to help them hire individuals and executives into their company right away.”

In the new version of platform services, team members extend their focus across the whole VC value chain, including supporting due diligence on deals.

“How are they going to share insights across the 100-plus companies we’ve already invested in to the ones we’re looking at in pipeline?” asks Amatori. “That gives us more purview into the investment side and the investment side more respect for the platform operations side.”

Amatori also looks forward to continuing to develop Left Lane’s Fast Growth Summits, which expanded from New York to Europe in 2024. As more VC firms have built out their platform service capabilities by adding expertise on talent, growth and other things in-house, the only edge that a VC firm has anymore is its network. “It’s who you know, who you can connect your portfolio companies to, so [the Fast Growth Summits are] a way to bring that together,” she adds.

Andrew Cal
CISO, WestCap

Cal began his career in cybersecurity while serving in the US Army. As part of a brigade combat team, he oversaw building out the technology and communications platforms used in combat situations. WestCap’s head of governance, risk and compliance hired Cal to help portfolio companies achieve full regulatory compliance, after which he was named deputy chief information security officer. The growth equity investor promoted him to CISO in August 2024.

While his focus is security, Cal also looks to add value in other ways. For example, during introductions at a welcome lunch for newcomers, he realized most new hires didn’t have investment backgrounds. He pitched the idea of a quick mentoring program to bring them up to speed on the dynamics and career paths of an investment firm.

“When an individual joins the firm, they’re offered the opportunity to be mentored by a principal or managing director,” he says. “I had as a mentor a managing director at the time. We set up bi-weekly meetings and I was able to bring him problems and he provided feedback about how that would work. And we’ve seen that success carried out across the firm.”

Cal currently leads a monthly lunch-and-learn program where all the CISOs or equivalents at all 38 of WestCap’s portfolio companies meet to learn about new processes and technologies. He hopes to further develop the program in 2025.

In addition to working with portfolio companies and WestCap’s investment team, Cal plans to “deliver information for our LPs, [such as] educating them about the marketing demands from a cybersecurity perspective, as well as the cybersecurity health programs for our portfolio companies,” he says. “Often, I’m asked by LPs if our companies have been breached, so I’m able to provide that information. But also, I want to provide another level of sophistication to demonstrate everything we’re doing to grow and mature security across the portfolio.”

Naomi GoezNaomi Goez
Principal, Forum Ventures

Goez, who started her career in the fashion industry supply chain, was drawn to venture by the opportunity to unlock value in legacy industries where labor and hardware constraints historically have hampered widespread innovation adoption.

“That is very prevalent across these more archaic universes, so where I spent a lot of my time this past year and where I anticipate spending more time this year is supply chain and healthcare,” she tells VCJ.

Forum makes about 100 investments each year, with 85 percent of them through its accelerator program and the remainder through its studio and fund. “This means we get to be a part of lots of people’s journeys,” Goez says. “That is something that makes me excited to start the day every day. I want to better understand what are the resources I can bring to the table? What is the best way to be a value-add investor beyond capital?”

Because the first hurdle she encountered in breaking into venture was lack of access to information, Goez tries to bridge that gap for new founders. With the support of Forum and nonprofit groups that support immigrants, Goez runs lunch-and-learn workshops to demystify the VC universe. “We know that many deals in the venture world get done via referrals. How do you get referred to a VC if you’ve never spoken to a VC or if you have no network in the space? How do you go about developing one?”

An investment memo is among the tools she uses to educate founders. “Reverse-engineering that provides the founder with the right frameworks to best position themselves for productive conversations with investors,” she says.

Frustrated with how men dominate even venture capital social events, Goez has collaborated with other women investors to provide small “pilates and pitches” sessions, where women founders and investors can meet in an environment more conducive to meaningful conversations, at no cost to the founders.

Shikhin Garg
Chief of staff, Inventus Capital Partners

Garg joined Inventus in 2022 with no prior experience in venture or business strategy. He has quickly become a master at building on connections that partners at Inventus have cultivated over the years for the benefit of the firm’s start-ups.

His goal as chief of staff is “to help the firm become more efficient and transform the entire processes to be more lean and technology-automated,” he tells VCJ.

A key part of his job is connecting Inventus’s portfolio companies to potential follow-on investors through warm introductions. To help with that process, he has compiled profiles of every VC firm in the US and India. After finding potential matches, he uses an internal database of more than 80,000 contacts to find direct or indirect connections with the VC firms.

“It increases the success rate of our start-ups getting a positive response from these VC firms,” Garg says. He estimates that 20 percent of these conversations move forward, with roughly 10 percent of them eventually resulting in investments.

This year, Garg plans to expand the no-agenda cocktail events Inventus began hosting in September 2024 to connect high-profile chief experience officers from the San Francisco Bay Area to other smart people in the venture industry, including founders from Inventus’s portfolio.

The next step is to organize focused dinners or meetups with eight to 10 people from specific verticals as further opportunities for founders in order to meet prospective VCs and customers.

“The aim is to get them interested in our fund as a possible LP because these are experienced CXOs across companies. Once they interact with our start-ups, they’ll know the quality of companies that we invest in, and eventually we’ll build a relationship with them and there’s a chance that they will want to invest in our fund as well.”

Alexandra "Sasha" Jostrom-ReiserAlexandra “Sasha” Jostrom-Reiser
Principal, Cybernetix Ventures

Jostrom-Reiser is excited about Cybernetix’s expanded focus on robots used in climate tech. The Boston-based firm sees robotics as “a labor force multiplier” that can help address labor shortages for work that is dull, dirty and dangerous.

She sees robotics as a critical enabler of the drive to build a greener economy. “We continue to see a lot of promise in robotics technologies helping to solve challenges with the transition to new power generation sources,” mostly to address labor shortages. “There’s been a lot of innovation in solar, whether it’s robots that assemble solar farms by dropping in panels [or] autonomous diggers to dig trenches for the solar panel racks.”

Outside of investments, Jostrom-Reiser focuses on fostering relationships with entrepreneurs in the technology hubs of Denmark and Switzerland. “It’s no secret [those countries] aren’t huge economies, so being able to bring these technologies and founders to the US market to help them realize their dream of building their company is a great opportunity.”

Christopher McKinnonChristopher McKinnon
Partner, Morrison Foerster

McKinnon is excited to see where emerging technology is headed in the New Year. “I think we’re going to see a lot of AI-impacted core technologies do well, and I’m excited to see which ancillary segments within AI and others within tech more broadly seem to get that backing,” he tells VCJ. When advising investors and start-ups on deals, “being able to see which companies end up getting the most backing from VCs will be the most insightful thing to track.”

Prior to rejoining Morrison Foerster, McKinnon spent four years as an associate general counsel and legal director at SoftBank Group. He uses that experience to enhance his interactions with investors and founders as outside counsel.

“Knowing what the investment committee prep and process is like, knowing what internal timing demands and other leverage points are important to investors on a day-in and day-out basis is really useful and comes through when I’m advising my start-up clients on the one hand or investor clients on the other,” he says.

Having worked with investment professionals on all kinds of scenarios “tends to give a good balance and perspective when as outside counsel you’re helping at the most demanding phase of an investment transaction, which is between term sheet and deal signing and deal closing.”

Since becoming a Morrison Foerster partner in January 2024, McKinnon has been involved more in direct discussions with business principals and investor-side in-house lawyers.

Denver YuDenver Yu
Analyst, Generational Partners

Yu joined his former colleagues from Starburst Aerospace to launch Generational in May 2023. They originally planned to maintain the aerospace and defense focus of their prior firm. But as they met with prospective company founders, it became clear that many of the best and brightest were more interested in tackling challenges around renewable energy.

Generational’s latest investment is in a company called Nomura, started by two former operators at Palantir who want to build software to help utility companies and other owners of renewables assets generate more revenue at reduced costs out of these assets. “This company comes from the aerospace and defense world , but it’s moving into energy and utilities,” Yu says. “That is a prime example of the type of talent that we are looking for and the sort of founders that we look to get behind.”

What excites him and his colleagues most is the opportunity to participate in venture capital’s funding of innovation for old, highly regulated industries that until recently had not been disrupted by technology. Those includes aerospace, energy/utilities, agriculture, construction and automotive. Innovating in these industries “can give people access to more energy, more water, safer bridges, harder materials – things we often take for granted.”

Mike SarchetMike Sarchet
Investor, World Innovation Lab

Sarchet is looking forward to further refining some of the investment theses for two corporate venture funds he manages: the Suzuki Global Ventures Fund ($100 million in AUM) for Suzuki Motor Corporation and the Fujiyama Bridge Lab Fund ($10 million in AUM) for Shizuoka Broadcasting.

Suzuki’s fund invests in start-ups related to carbon neutrality, manufacturing, electrification and autonomy for their growing relevance to Suzuki’s automotive business. “Increasingly, we’ve looked at advanced manufacturing as a broad category, with supply chain resiliency and flexibility as a major subset of that,” he tells VCJ. That entails looking at tech that could support adaptive, very visible supply chains and enable companies to do that in a carbon-neutral way.

Regarding the Shizuoka fund, Sarchet notes it has increasingly shifted its focus to the overlap of aging societies and interest in well-being and longevity to think about how those themes intersect with media. “We took some guidance from AARP, which has done a lot of work on how you sell and market and advertise to senior communities. That’s a really relevant story to the Japanese population as they age.”

Sarchet cites communities and content to help elder populations maintain their fitness, as well as services that help those populations build a sense of community when they become lonely or distant from their families.

He also wants to have a bigger strategic impact on the start-ups that his funds invest in. “I think we can be a little bit more bold as we invest going forward” by writing checks at the right time for optimal impact. “And how do we hit the ground running with connections for them and a plan for their growth through our partnerships with Shizuoka or Suzuki, or any other LP we may have a fund for?”

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