Women Founders Represent

Virtual Pitch Competition

November 19, 2020 | 10 AM PT

Opening Doors in Venture Capital

Women Founders Represent is a virtual pitch event hosted by the Amazon Alexa Fund and All Raise offering up to $1 million investment for women entrepreneurs from Amazon’s Alexa Fund. 

Pitch applications have closed, but you can still watch the finalists pitch in front of our investor panel. By joining us on November 19, you are helping to open doors to venture capital and empowering women entrepreneurs on their mission to change the world with cutting edge technology and innovative businesses. 

Who is This Event For?

This event is intended for investors, entrepreneurs and technologists interested in developing a community of diverse leaders. This philosophy is central to everything that we do, given that our customers, vendors, and internal teams are diverse, and represent a wide array of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, age, religion, sexual orientation, military status, backgrounds, and political views. Valuing different perspectives helps push us to think bigger and differently, enabling us to deliver better products and services for customers.

What to Expect

The event will feature up to 10 finalists who will pitch their company to a panel of leaders and top-tier investors for an opportunity to receive venture capital investment from the Alexa Fund.

Selected companies will have an opportunity to receive up to $1 million in venture capital investment from the Alexa Fund and be selected as “most innovative”. Each finalist will also receive Amazon startup perks, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits. All Raise will guarantee acceptance to its bootcamps and create an All Raise cohort in which finalists will have access to resources and stay engaged as a group.

We are excited to have a panel of prominent venture capital investors participate in the pitch event, including Dayna Grayson, co-founder and general partner at Construct Capital; Charles Hudson, managing partner and founder of Precursor Ventures; Renata Quintini, co-founder and managing director of Renegade PartnersLaurie Yoler, general partner of Playground Global; and Miriam Daniel, VP of Amazon Alexa and Echo Devices.

As a way to foster visibility and support from the technology and venture capital communities, everyone is welcome to attend the virtual event.

What’s to Come

For those interested in our ongoing and future initiatives, visit our Women Founders Represent website and stay tuned for more information. Lastly, join us at AfroTech World.

Panelists

Dayna Grayson
Dayna Grayson

Co-founder & General Partner
Construct Capital

Dayna Grayson is Co-founder and General Partner of Construct Capital, an early stage venture firm that invests in extraordinary founders building technology to transform the most foundational industries of our economy. Dayna was one of the first venture capitalists to invest in real transformation of industrial sectors of our economy through software based models. During her time as a partner at NEA (2012-2019), she backed companies creating new advances in manufacturing, automation, and vertically integrated consumer brands. She was the lead investor from the earliest stages and was on the board of companies including Desktop Metal (2015 - today), Tulip (2017 - 2020), Onshape (acqd by PTC) (2013-2019), Framebridge (acqd by Graham Holdings) (2014-2020), and Evenly (2019 - today). She also led investments in Formlabs, Neuralmagic, Guideline, and Wirewheel.

Prior to joining NEA, Dayna was an investor at North Bridge Venture Partners in Boston. She started her career in product development and led design efforts at Blackbaud [BLKB], the leading global provider of software to nonprofit organizations, as the company grew to over $130 million in revenue and completed a successful public offering.

She is a graduate of the University of Virginia (Systems Engineering) and Harvard Business School, where she serves as a venture partner today.

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Dayna Grayson
Charles Hudson

Founder & Managing Director
Precursor Ventures

Charles Hudson is the Managing Partner and Founder of Precursor Ventures, an early­ stage venture capital firm focused on investing in the first institutional round of investment for the most promising software and hardware companies.

Prior to founding Precursor Ventures, Charles was a Partner at Uncork Capital (formerly known as SoftTech VC). In this role, he focused on identifying investment opportunities in mobile infrastructure, mobile applications, and marketplaces. In addition to his investment activities, he supported SoftTech portfolio companies on business and corporate development matters. He was also the Co­Founder and CEO of Bionic Panda Games, an Android­-focused mobile games startup based in San Francisco, CA.

Prior to joining SoftTech VC and co­founding Bionic Panda Games, Charles Hudson was the VP of Business Development for Serious Business until the company was acquired by Zynga in February 2010. Prior to Serious Business, he was the Sr. Director for Business Development at Gaia Interactive, an online hangout and virtual world for teens. Prior to Gaia, Charles worked in New Business Development at Google and focused on new partnership opportunities for early ­stage products in the advertising, mobile, and e-­commerce markets. Prior to joining Google, he was a Product Manager for IronPort Systems, a leading provider of anti-­spam hardware appliances that was acquired by Cisco Systems for $830 million in 2007. Before IronPort Systems, Charles worked at In-Q-Tel, the venture capital fund backed by the Central Intelligence Agency, where he invested in early-stage hardware and software companies.

Charles graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Economics and Spanish. Charles holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

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Dayna Grayson
Renata Quintini

Co-Founder & Managing Director
Renegade Partners

Renata is a Co-Founder and Managing Director of Renegade Partners. Prior to starting Renegade, Renata was a Partner at Lux Capital, an early stage deep technology investment firm, where she invested in founding teams transforming the future of humanity through the use of technology.

Prior to joining Lux in 2017, Renata was a General Partner at Felicis Ventures, where sheworked with startups that define new realities, markets and/or business models. Amongst them:Dollar Shave Club ($1B acquisition by Unilever), Bonobos (acquired by Walmart), Planet (microsatellites) and Cruise Automation ($1B acquisition by GM).

Before becoming a venture capitalist, Renata was an investment manager at StanfordUniversity’s endowment, which invests in dozens of private equity and venture capital funds.

Renata is a Board Member at the NVCA, a Trustee at the Stanford Athletics Department Venture Fund, the Stanford Law School Venture Fund and a Founding Member of All Raise. She earned a law degree from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, LLM and MBA degrees from Stanford University and is a CFA charterholder. She’s also a Brazilian immigrant, a three-time state champion black belt in karate, and a Bossa Nova guitar player.

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Dayna Grayson
Laurie Yoler

General Partner
Playground Global

Laurie Yoler is an experienced board director and strategist skilled in advising companies and founders in imagining, building, and scaling disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence and cloud computing. She is known for taking a holistic, enterprise-wide view to quickly assess and shape technology into new, differentiated products and services. She is savvy in fundraising, M&A strategy and negotiations, cybersecurity oversight, intellectual property strategy, and in devising complex, unconventional strategic alliances.

Yoler has served on the boards of public, private and non-profit organizations. Most notably, she served as a Founding Board Member of Tesla, serving on the board of directors from the earliest days, and on the board of advisors through taking the company public. She also served on the board of Interactive Investor International in London, through taking the company public, and until its acquisition by AMP Bank.

She currently serves on the board of directors of Bose, Church & Dwight (NYSE:CHD), Zoox, Leaf Logistics, Lacuna.AI and the Computer History Museum, and on the advisory boards of Accenture, Platform Science, AI4All, and the Washington State Frank Scholars Entrepreneurship Program. She is also a General Partner with early-stage deep-tech venture capital firm Playground Global, as well as an active investor with Broadway Angels and HealthTech Capital.

Yoler has been an integral part of the development and launch of many new innovations and products, both from within large companies like Qualcomm, Visa, Sun Microsystems, and Accenture, and as one of a small group of founders/investors of a new entrepreneurial venture with a radical idea like Tesla, DNA Direct, and Packet Design.

Most recently, Yoler was President of Qualcomm Labs and SVP of Business Development for Qualcomm, driving new internal innovation, and exploring and closing new strategic partnerships and joint ventures. Previously, Yoler was a founding managing director at GrowthPoint Technology Partners, an investment bank advising entrepreneurs in building strategic alliances, completing M&A transactions and raising capital.

Yoler graduated summa cum laude from Washington State University with a bachelor’s degree in management information systems. She completed a semester in the international business program at the University of Copenhagen and completed executive management programs at Kellogg, Stanford and INSEAD. In 2019, she was awarded a CERT certificate in Cybersecurity Oversight. Yoler has been very active in continuing her education at Stanford in board governance, biotechnology, biochemistry, neuropsychology, neuroscience and geology. She also guest lectures in the Engineering, Law and Business Schools at Stanford.

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Dayna Grayson
Miriam Daniel

VP of Echo Devices & Alexa Skills Tech
Amazon

Miriam Daniel is the Vice President of Echo Devices and Alexa Skills technologies. She is one of thecreative minds behind Echo and Alexa, innovations that have changed the way we interact withthe world around us. Miriam joined Amazon and the Alexa team in 2014. She is responsible forthe innovative lineup of Echo Products and Alexa experiences that delight our customers everyday, as well as the developer technologies that skill builders use to bring Alexa experiences to life.

Miriam has a background in computer engineering and has previously held product andengineering leadership positions at Intel Corporation.

Founders

Meet the Founders at Women Founders Represent

We reviewed hundreds of applications from women founders around the world, and selected ten finalists to pitch at Women Founders Represent. These ten founders are solving problems to improve water quality, enhance personal fashion and beauty, provide access to sports media, deliver food through ghost kitchens, bring fresh food to the house with indoor gardening, simplify pet health, create the next generation of edge technology and improve criminal justice systems. 

Read more about the founders below, and register to watch them pitch to our investor panel on November 19:

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