Kindred Ventures

About

Founded in 2014, Kindred Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital fund led by Steve Jang and Kanyi Maqubela, and is based in San Francisco, California. Collectively as a team, we have invested in over 100 companies in our careers, and have served as founders, early employees, and advisors in several pioneering technology startups.

Our mission is to back visionary and dedicated founders who want to solve the most important problems and vastly improve people’s lives around the world. Our approach is twofold: we invest in technology startups in their first rounds of financing, and also we assemble talented founders to form startups and build products we believe should exist. More on this here.

Today, our portfolio is a diverse group of founders tackling problems in a multitude of theme areas and distributed across the globe, of which their combined teams and operations now cover every region on the planet: North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa.

We strive to be a true coach, mentor, and guide to these driven entrepreneurs as they navigate their startup’s journey.

Managing Partners

 

Steve is the Founder and Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital fund investing in technology startups based in San Francisco. In 2023, he was noted in the Forbes’ Midas List as one of the top 50 tech venture capital investors in the world.

Full Bio

Kanyi serves as a Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures. He focuses his investment and formation work in theme areas including digital health and wellness, e-commerce, financial technology, supply-chain, and climate tech.

Full Bio

 
 

Team

Natalie Arora

  • Head of Operations

    At Kindred, Natalie leads founder services, investor relations, and internal systems. She has 10+ years of experience operating in startups and VC, where she’s developed founder programs, helped raise four funds, and scaled firm systems. She started her career in sales and partnerships in food tech startups, and most recently led ops at Susa Ventures.

Lesley Gil

  • Executive Assistant

    At Kindred, Lesley provides comprehensive support for Steve Jang in his role as an investor, an executive management member and various startups and projects of which he is a co-founder. She has direct involvement in every aspect of the firm working alongside the Kindred team, our portfolio companies, strategic partners and our limiter partners. Her executive support experience spans over 20 years working in fast-paced environments including Apple, Meta, Twitter in addition to startups West and UnitedMasters.

Eunice Azarraga

  • Executive Assistant

    At Kindred, Eunice supports Kanyi Maqubela. With 4 years of executive administrative experience, she is well-versed in managing executive calendars, coordinating meetings, and handling confidential information. Her background in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry has also helped hone her skills in customer handling, travel management, social media management, and administrative work.

Tsolmon Jargalsaikhan

  • Director of Finance

    At Kindred, TJ is responsible for finance, portfolio monitoring, compliance, and digital asset management. He has over 10 years of experience in venture finance, debt underwriting, and financial reporting roles across venture capital, venture debt, and real estate private equity. Previously, he worked at DFJ Growth and Threshold Ventures as part of their combined finance and operations team.

Evan Chen

  • Research Associate

    At Kindred, Evan focuses on AI infrastructure, developer tooling, web3, fintech, and climate tech. He has experience from Microsoft in corporate finance, strategic M&A, institutional hedging, and product management as well as data engineering at a fintech startup. He has written tokenomics whitepapers for several crypto projects, co-founded a DeFi protocol, and has started an investment DAO. He studied finance and computer science at University of Michigan.

Holyn Kanake

  • Research Associate

    At Kindred, Holyn focuses on AI/ML, consumer software and hardware, digital health, and web3. She was one of the first people to launch a social token on Ethereum, an experience that led her to the treasury team at Friends With Benefits ($FWB), a decentralized creative network. Before that, she helped build the content partnerships business at Twitter as a Strategy & Operations Manager. Holyn has served as a guest lecturer at NYU Stern, is a published writer, and continues to advise early stage startups. Occasionally, she writes about frontier technology and culture in her newsletter, Online-Offline.

Frances Choi

  • Operations Manager

    At Kindred, Frances runs fund operations, events, and communications. Passionate about global issues and its intersection with entrepreneurship, she’s drawn to Kindred’s exploration into frontier industries. She spent 3 years at OpenAI and built their event, engagement, and brand strategies. Prior to that, she started her tech career at Twitch where she experienced its rapid growth across a variety of roles in the administrative, HR, and people ops functions.

Sierra Lord

  • Chief of Staff

    At Kindred, Sierra has direct involvement in the firm’s frontline strategy and operational processes, supporting the managing partners on portfolio activities and new investment opportunities. She has over two decades of experience working in administrative and executive operations within a diverse range of industries including finance, real estate, communications, and technology. Most recently, she served as the Executive Staff Lead, Office of the CEO at Twitter where she held Chief of Staff responsibilities overseeing a variety of critical executive operations.