Cinta Putra

Venture Partner, VoicePunch

About VoicePunch

VoicePunch is an early-stage venture fund that invests in founders who are enabling the next wave of voice AI and audio technologies. The firm’s mission is to bring together the voice tech community and support founders with capital, strategy, and access to networks.

Kristina Milyuchikhina

Head of Alexa Startups & Venture Capital DEI Business Development at Amazon Alexa Fund

Kristina is a Head of Alexa Startups & VC DEI business development at Amazon Alexa Fund. Prior to that she held various business development roles within Amazon in retail and B2B e-commerce space. Kristina is a Wharton MBA graduate with triple major in finance, strategic management, operations & information management.

Priyanka Mitra

Principal, M12 – Microsoft’s Venture Fund

Priyanka is a principal for M12 in the Bay Area. Prior to M12, she was an investor at Tola Capital focused on B2B enterprise software and SaaS venture and growth equity stage investing, and a researcher at Bridgewater Associates—a Connecticut-based global macroeconomic hedge fund. Priyanka is a graduate of Harvard University, where she majored in history and science, and pursued extensive coursework in pre-medical mathematics and sciences. She has completed scientific research fellowships at Harvard Medical School in computational neurobiology, and was awarded Harvard’s David Rockefeller International Experience grant and the Harvard-University of Madrid prize to conduct macroeconomic research on global healthcare economies of scale. She was also named a Harvard College Scholar.

About M12

M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, invests in early-stage enterprise software companies with a focus on applied AI, business applications, infrastructure, security, and vanguard technologies. Since 2016, M12 has invested in over 100 companies, helping startups accelerate growth with unparalleled access to Microsoft. With offices in San Francisco, Seattle, London, Tel Aviv, and Bengaluru, M12 has the team and resources to support entrepreneurs globally. M12 is a return-driven fund investing independently of Microsoft’s business units and technology offerings. Follow M12 on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Emily Lonetto

Voiceflow, GrowthTO

Emily is the Head of Growth at Voiceflow – a platform that helps designers, developers, and their teams design, prototype and launch voice & conversational experiences. Before Voiceflow, Emily was the second growth hire at Clio, introducing product growth experimentation to the org. Before joining Clio, Emily led product growth at PartnerStack (formerly GrowSumo) YC’15, and helped automate/scale Tilt (acquired by Airbnb) YC’12 massive ambassador and community program across the globe. In her spare time, Emily is a speaker, advisor and cofounder/co-organizer of GrowthTO and currently helps startups tackle early growth strategy with several incubators and advisory councils across North America and Tel Aviv.

About Voiceflow

Voiceflow is an easy way to design, prototype, and launch voice and chatbots with little to no code.

About GrowthTO

GrowthToronto is all about teaching people how to integrate ‘growth’ into their product and teams. How do we grow? One of the most common questions asked of marketers and product teams alike. Our aim is to demystify growth and enable individuals to put these tools into practice. Not just another meetup/community, you will leave each session or program with accessible and actionable tools to put these into practice.

Minda Brusse

First Row Partners

Minda Brusse has been in the startup ecosystem for over 25 years. In her early career, she was a lynchpin employee at a venture-backed company acquired by Accenture. She continued to find her way into roles and startups near core innovations in tech, including online marketing, blockchain, and e-procurement innovation.

Over time, Minda found that a key lever in enabling innovation came from the capital that fuels it; and she dug deep — honing her skills as an investor and fund manager with Seattle Angel Conference and seeking mentorship from experienced investors. During the pandemic, she co-founded The 1K Project to help families in need, raising over $3M for 1,000+ families to receive cash grants.

Minda is also a Venture Partner for 2048 Ventures, based in New York. In this role, she focuses on Seattle and Portland and also collaborates with colleagues across the country.

About First Row Partners

In early 2020, we (Minda Brusse and Yoko Okano) began building a venture firm that fills a gap in the startup ecosystem — capital isn’t reaching early stage founders efficiently. As an operator-led micro fund, we use our expertise to find, fund and advance startups in the early part of the journey. We invest in pre-seed and seed stage companies, where technology and/or data are differentiators in the solution. While we are based in the Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, we invests across North America.

We believe in the future of technology that engages us at human-scale; specifically, we invest in companies that transform how we connect communities, perform paid work, and experience everyday commerce. We value the human ingenuity involved in innovation, and actively work to reduce the founder-funder power and information asymmetry in the startup ecosystem.