Aditi Maliwal is a partner at Upfront, leveraging a global perspective to invest in the highest-potential founders and teams. She invests in pre-seed and seed-stage fintech and saas companies, leading and supporting Upfront investments including Clair, Arcade, Writer.ai, Stem, Dayslice and Renew.

Before joining Upfront, Aditi was a product manager on the Next Billion Users team at Google, in a hybrid role leading investments in and building product for companies in emerging markets. Previously she worked on the Corporate Development team at Google, leading acquisitions across various sectors including AI, Messaging, and Media. Prior to Google, she worked in early-stage venture at Crosslink Capital leading investments in BetterUp, Chime, and PowerToFly, and before that in investment banking at Deutsche Bank, in the technology banking group.

She holds a B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University and has lived between India, Hong Kong, Singapore, and San Francisco.

David Chen is founder of Protoscale Capital, and invests from prototype to scale across enterprise software, healthcare, and crypto. He was formerly a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where he invested in companies like Guardant Health (NASDAQ:GH), Clever, and Blockchain.com.

Prior to Lightspeed, David was a product manager at Facebook and co-founded a consumer internet company. He has a PhD in Science, Technology, and Management from Harvard Business School and Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He also has MS and BA degrees in Computer Science from Harvard.

Dom is a Partner at Ripple Ventures, leading pre-seed and seed stage investments into enterprise software, developer tools, and web3 infra companies. He works closely with founders to find product market fit, hire talent, and raise capital. Dom is also the founder of the RippleX Fellowship program, which empowers underrepresented student founders and aspiring VCs across the world.

Jason is a Partner at Contrary, focusing on early-stage investments. As a generalist investor, he has invested across applied AI/ML, dev tools, fintech, agtech, and healthcare – largely into companies that expand markets and democratize access to technology.

Prior to Contrary, he founded two venture-backed companies, one a food marketplace and the other in office management SaaS. He studied English and economics at Yale and has an MBA and MA in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Lauder Institute.

Linxin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Chowbus, food delivery platform that provides high-quality, authentic Asian food to customers in North America.

Linxin holds a Masters degree from the Illinois Tech Stuart School of Business and a Bachelor’s degree from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

Shawn is a proud Chinese-American immigrant who grew up in the Los Angeles area. He is an alumnus of UC Berkeley class of 2011 with a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and Minor in Sustainable Design.

During his senior year, he joined his college friends to start a daily deals company called Munch On Me (YC class of S11) and dove into the tech startup industry. He later co-founded a food delivery company, Caviar, in early 2012. Caviar was acquired by Square, now a public company. in 2014 and then acquired again by DoorDash in 2019.

He is currently a Co-Founder and General Partner of Beluga Capital which has invested and advised in several food tech startups, restaurants, and numerous other companies. He is also currently a Senior Advisor at Grishin Robotics.

Besides tech, Shawn is the founding partner of Umai Hospitality Group, a restaurant group invested in major franchises like The Halal Guys and Bonchon Fried Chicken, along with local brands like Rooster and Rice.

Steven is currently VP/GM at Ambarella (NASDAQ: AMBA), one of the market leaders in Multi Modal AI Inference Silicon. Steven joined Ambarella through its $400M All Cash acquisition of Oculii, where he was the CEO/Co-Founder, growing the company to become the leading provider of AI Software for Radar Perception.

Prior to founding Oculii, Steven was a partner at Kleiner Perkins where he invested in early stage (Seed/Series A) HardTech companies pioneering Autonomous Systems, AI + Machine Learning, Space, IoT, 3D Printing, Robotics, and Cloud Infrastructure. Before KP, Steven co-founded Kumu Networks (Self Interference Cancellation for Full Duplex Wireless – $65M from NEA, Khosla Ventures, Third Point, Cisco, Verizon). Steven started his career as a management/strategy consultant at McKinsey and Uber, where he specialized in M&A diligence and expansion strategy.

Steven holds a PhD and MS in EECS from Stanford University where he won several best paper awards for his research in AI + Wireless Communications, and graduated at age 23 – completing both degrees in 3 years. Prior to Stanford, he received a B.S. in EECS from the University of Michigan.