5 Women to Watch in Venture - Spring 2025

In this Spring's edition of Women to Watch in Venture, I'm thrilled to showcase five women in venture who are making significant strides in the industry and beyond. Their successes and visions inspire me deeply as they reshape venture capital with their innovative approaches, passion, and dedication to impact.

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These remarkable women come from varied backgrounds, enriching their funds and the industry with unique insights. Unified by their drive to challenge the norm, creative approach to problem-solving, and unwavering support for founders and colleagues, they truly stand out.

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What makes this Spring edition particularly special is that it marks a major milestone of 50 featured woman to date. A milestone that speaks to the incredible depth of talent transforming venture capital today.

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Let's celebrate their inspiring accomplishments and ambitious goals this season.

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Jenna Greenspan

Investor Relations & Communications at Shine Capital

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Jenna Greenspan leads investor relations and communications at Shine Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm that partners with creative, convincing, and relentless entrepreneurs to create iconic businesses. Shine Capital is a generalist fund focused on high-conviction investments, closing only a handful of deals each year while leaning heavily into their portfolio companies.

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Jenna's journey to venture began at Bloomberg in a software sales role, where she discovered her passion for relationship building. This led her to Apollo Global Management, where she got her first exposure to investor relations within their larger global team. It was an invaluable learning experience, exposing her to what she considers world-class institutional investor relations and the art of nurturing long-term LP partnerships.

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Seeking a more intimate environment, Jenna joined Redesign Health during a period of explosive growth, helping to build their investor relations and capital raising functions from the ground up. She kept being drawn to the intimacy of smaller organizations, ultimately landing at Shine Capital as their first and only IR person.

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"Working at a larger institutional fund taught me that LP relationships span decades, not fundraising cycles. I'm always playing the long game, building trust and nurturing connections even when they don't invest immediately."

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Jenna brings institutional sophistication to Shine while maintaining the entrepreneurial agility that early-stage investing requires.

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Jenna hopes to impact the industry by becoming part of the next generation of great GPs and allocators, building lasting relationships that will shape partnerships for decades to come. Her focus is on continuing to see more women in both IR and investor roles while fostering the kind of collaborative relationships that make venture capital thrive.

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Jenna's hot take? Be transparent about your job search. People in your network won't think of you for opportunities if they don't know you're open to change. Don't be shy about admitting you're looking for something new—all her career moves came from telling friends, family, and mentors that she was ready for a change.

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Jenna's Career Advice

• Fake it till you make it. Be comfortable in situations where you don't know everything, but have confidence in your ability to figure it out as you go.
• Be strategic and resourceful about learning what you need to know—spread your questions out among different people and learn to read between the lines.

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Nia Pryce

Events & Ecosystem Development at Forum Ventures

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Nia Pryce leads events and ecosystem development at Forum Ventures, where she orchestrates an impressive 70+ events across more than 9 cities throughout the year. Forum Ventures operates as a comprehensive early-stage partner, running a venture studio, an accelerator, and a pre-seed fund—all focused on B2B SaaS.

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Originally from Toronto, Nia's path to venture was anything but traditional. After trying government work and consulting through her university's co-op program, she found her calling at a hydroponic container farming startup called Growcer. She joined the week the company appeared on Dragon's Den (Canada's Shark Tank), initially just to help manage the flood of social media responses. That small task changed her career trajectory entirely.

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Over three and a half years at Growcer, Nia grew from the eighth employee to part of a 30-person team, ultimately becoming head of culture while leading the marketing function. Her favorite part was supporting the founders through fundraising, accelerator programs, and strategic decision-making. The experience of connecting communities in Northern Canada—teaching people who had never grown food how to share knowledge with each other—perfectly prepared her for her current role building founder communities and connection at scale.

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"I like being close to the founders and being able to support them as they scale their companies. When I thought about what I want to do next, that was really what I kept at the core—how do I support founders? Because that's what brings me the most joy."

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What makes Nia's role unique is her focus on sourcing through events, not just post-investment support. Her events serve dual purposes: building forums (pun intended) for founders, investors, and operators to connect while simultaneously identifying potential founders for Forum's various programs.

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Nia hopes to impact the industry by significantly increasing the number of underrepresented founders who receive funding. She's particularly focused on reaching potential founders who don't yet see themselves in that role—like someone working at Google who sees problems worth solving but hasn't considered the entrepreneurial path.

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Nia's hot take? AI will create an extreme shift in the venture ecosystem. Founders will need less capital to get further, giving them more leverage over VCs. This will force VCs to compete harder on value-add beyond just capital, making platform functions more critical than ever.

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Nia's Career Advice

Work at an early-stage startup before entering VC. The founder empathy and operational understanding you'll gain are invaluable for both evaluating companies and supporting portfolio founders. Without that experience, it's hard to understand the depths of empathy founders need on their journey.

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Amanda Heyman

Managing Partner at Tundra Ventures

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Amanda Heyman is the Managing Partner at Tundra Ventures, an exclusively pre-seed venture fund founded in Minneapolis that backs companies outside of Silicon Valley. Tundra focuses on modernizing the core infrastructure of healthcare, financial access, and environmental resilience — in short, "health, wealth, and resilience."

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What sets Tundra apart is their counter-coastal sourcing strategy combined with coastal support. While they invest in founders outside Silicon Valley, they leverage their Bay Area presence to build pathways back into critical coastal networks that founders need to scale.

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Amanda's career exemplifies the power of a portfolio approach. She started as a newspaper reporter in New Mexico investigating political corruption, became a lawyer supporting sustainable agriculture startups, worked for the United Nations in Mauritius writing organic agriculture legislation, and co-founded a fantasy soccer company called Starting Eleven. Each experience built upon the last, creating her unique perspective on supporting founders who don't fit traditional molds.

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Amanda realized she was more interested in building businesses than just doing the legal work. This lead to her and Danielle Steer joining forces to build Lunar Startups, Minnesota's first inclusive accelerator, and then partnering again to launch Tundra Ventures. 

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“As a journalist, I learned how to ask really good questions which is critical for really good investment diligence. My favorite phrase from journalism is: “if your mother says she loves you, check it out”. Don’t take what's given to you at face value.”

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Amanda hopes to impact the industry by making the pattern for excellence look different. She's focused on working with other emerging managers to build a collaborative ecosystem that supports venture-backable founders regardless of what they look like or where they're located.

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Amanda's hot take? VC's need to stop buzzing around constantly and take time for deep thinking. The industry's obsession with being everywhere—at every event, on every social platform, in every meeting—prevents the thoughtful reflection needed to make better investment decisions. VCs need regular intervals of deep work and thinking time.

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Amanda's Career Advice

• Don't wait to be invited in. You'll have to make room for yourself. 
• Put in the work to build a network and understand the industry. There are more programs now than ever - scout programs, fellowships, angel groups. Do your research but don't let research become an excuse for not jumping in.

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Mia Farnham

Principal at Precursor Ventures

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Mia Farnham is a Principal at Precursor Ventures, where she focuses on sourcing and investing. Precursor has invested in over 450 portfolio companies across five funds, maintaining their founding thesis of investing in "strangers with data" - being unafraid to back unconventional founders at the earliest stages.

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Mia's entry into venture stemmed from a passion for women's health that was sparked during her consulting days at Deloitte. While working with a multi-billion-dollar life sciences company, she asked about innovations in women's health and was met with blank stares. This moment revealed a massive gap in the market and sparked her curiosity about who was actually building solutions in this space.

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During business school, she spent her first year talking to anyone in startups and investing who would discuss women's health, ultimately creating an investment thesis on the intersection of women's health and wearables. This work, showcasing over 110 exits that had been poorly marketed as women's health companies, became her calling card for breaking into venture.

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After her MBA internship at Precursor, Mia took an intentional detour into operations, leading growth and ops at Attn:Grace, a company focused on building skin-safe products for women 50+. The experience gave her crucial founder empathy that makes her a better partner to founders.

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"I don't think you need to be an operator to be a good investor, but for me, it's been incredibly helpful. It's allowed me to be in the mindset of an operator and build up the right amount of empathy needed for founders on their journey."

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Mia also co-hosts The Learning Corner podcast with Precursor's GP Charles Hudson, creating a space for open questions and authentic learning - something she believes venture desperately needs more of.

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Mia hopes to impact the industry by bringing more transparency about venture's realities—the good, bad, and ugly. She wants people to feel empowered to share their experiences and what worked or didn't work, rather than perpetuating the glamorized version that leaves junior people unprepared.

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Mia's hot take? A bit of dissent from your team and peers on your deal flow is actually a good sign. If everyone loves every single one of your deals, you're probably operating in spaces everyone has already figured out. The best early-stage investors find value in areas where others say "I don't get that" or "we're not looking there."

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Mia's Career Advice

• Create evidence of your ability to do the job. Don't just submit a standard resume — build an investment thesis or analysis that demonstrates your thinking and passion for the work.
• Remember there's no single ideal profile for working in venture. If you have hesitance about whether you're good enough, that self-awareness actually makes you better than 90% of VCs who think they're the best at everything.

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Kim Nixon

Founder & Managing Partner at Open Venture Capital

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Kim Nixon is the Founder and Managing Partner at Open Venture Capital, a sport, health, and wellness-focused fund that invests in companies expanding access, expanding TAMs, and improving health outcomes. As a solo GP, Kim is responsible for all of it - investment strategy, LP relationship management, and providing operational support to help founders.

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Kim's career path was deliberately non-linear. Starting in management consulting at Deloitte, she transitioned to Under Armour during their footwear expansion, where she led strategy for building a path to $1 billion and launched their first smart shoe using sensor technology.

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Her roles at Under Armour exposed her to the intersection of connected health and wellness, plus acquisition strategies that would later inform her investment approach. After leading marketing for emerging markets and working at PE and VC-backed companies, she saw firsthand how domain expertise led to better investors.

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The inspiration to start her own fund came from information gatekeeping. When Kim inquired about investing personally in a private fund, she was met with a dismissive tone, seven-figure minimums, and little to no proactive education about basic investor operations (i.e. capital call procedures, etc). 

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"I took that personally. Not only am I going to start a fund for myself and for folks that look like me, but I'm going to make sure that the minimums don't have to be so high, that I explain how capital is called and allocated, and that I make space for people who otherwise would not be asked to be part of a venture fund."

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Kim's differentiated approach combines her operational background with what she calls "looking around corners"—identifying growth drivers first, then finding the best teams to execute against those thesis areas. This methodology requires significant upfront work but allows her to source the right founders for categories she's already validated.

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Kim hopes to impact the industry by increasing financial literacy around alternative assets, particularly within communities that have historically been excluded from venture investing. She's actively recruiting Black women and athletes as LPs, creating educational spaces for more robust education and conversations.

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Kim's hot take? Brooklyn versus everybody. Growing up in Brooklyn with an "us versus everybody" mentality has shaped her resilient and fearless approach to building something from nothing and never backing down from a challenge.

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Kim's Career Advice

Confidence is everything—people can smell lack of confidence before you even enter the room. Don't use diminutive language like "just," "only," or "kinda" when describing your accomplishments. If you want to break into VC, have a real perspective on why it would be beneficial for you to be there, and remember that this is capital moving to its highest and best use—make sure that's you.

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Nominate a woman to watch

This Spring edition represents not just five remarkable women, but a milestone moment as we celebrate our 50th featured woman in this series. Each story reinforces that there's no single path to venture capital success—only the common thread of supporting founders, challenging conventions, and building the future we want to see.

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If there is a woman you’d like to see us feature next, nominate her here.

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