She Has A $60M Fund Investing In Overlooked Markets (174) | Founding Partner of Chingona Ventures Samara Hernandez
Today we are honoring the Midwest by shining a light on Samara Hernandez, the Founding Partner of Chingona Ventures. Samara and her team are the perfect examples of the incredible talent living in our hometown of Chicago.
Chingona Ventures is an institutionally backed pre-seed stage fund focusing on investing in tech and tech-enabled companies across the U.S. The fund has $60MM in AUM and has made over 40 investments across technology sectors in Financial, Food, Future of Work and Learning, and Health/Wellness.Â
Samara is on the advisory boards for Coolwater, an organization to support the emerging manager community; Angeles Investors, an organization investing in early-stage startups led by Latinx founders; and Venture Forward, a non-profit working to get more diversity in the venture
capital ecosystem.
While the coasts tends to receive more attention and funding, the Midwest can go overlooked. But we have a lot of hustle over here and with Samara’s help, business owners of underrepresented backgrounds are securing the funding they need to do great things. This is especially important as founders with minority backgrounds find it hard to get funding.Â
In this week’s episode, Samara shares how her path to investing was a reaction to her environment. As a result, Chingona Ventures focuses on industries that are massively changing and founders whose backgrounds uniquely position them to create businesses in growth markets that are often overlooked. She and her team focus areas in financial technology, the future of work, the future of learning, food technology, and health/wellness. Chingona Ventures invests in underrepresented founders with both cold and warm intros. She and her team have reviewed over 7,000 cold and warm inbound submissions, averaging five to six deals reviewed per day, at the time, invested in more than 40 different companies. That is such a high volume for such a lean team!
This week, we talked aboutÂ
How the Midwest is making waves in the entrepreneurial space
Why her group chat is filled with women investors who are also wives and parents while they work
How to protect yourself and your company from fickle investorsÂ
Why Chingona Ventures takes cold submissions seriously
You can listen to the episode here.
No te lo quieres perder.
Con poder,
Lyanne
Thank you for joining us! Until next time, catch us here on Moneda Moves.