Nancy Torres becomes a partner at Ulu Ventures

Ulu Ventures, a leading venture capital firm and the first Latina-led investment fund of its kind in Silicon Valley, announced the promotion of two women from diverse communities to partner.

Nancy Torres and Kathy Chen, both with outstanding academic and professional backgrounds, especially as investors, join in their new leadership positions a growing investment team led by CEOs Clint Korver and Miriam Rivera, who is also CEO and co-founder.

With these two new promotions, Ulu Ventures, which has nearly $1.2 billion in Assets Under Management (AUM), and 10 unicorns in its portfolio, seeks to expand its investment opportunities and widen its experience in industrial sectors, always supporting diverse founders.

We just deepened our investing bench! Congrats to @iamnancyat and Kathy Chen. Part of our investment team that will launch @uluventures to the Next Generation and escape velocity! #DiversityandInclusion https://t.co/2zRULsCaBL

— Ulu Ventures (@uluventures) June 22, 2022

“Nancy and Kathy have quickly blended with the Ulu team over the last several months, bringing to the firm exciting new perspectives to our data-driven investment process. As partners, they will not only enhance our capabilities in Ulu’s traditional focus areas, but they will also allow our team to explore newer markets, such as sustainability, healthcare, fintech and consumer business,” said Clint Korver, Ulu’s co-founder and CEO.

Nancy Torres, who at Ulu Ventures focuses on investing in diverse teams, particularly in the areas of fintech and web3 (an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web based on blockchain technology, incorporating concepts such as decentralization and token economy), where, according to the company, “entrepreneurs are creating new types of access to more opportunities,” previously worked in banking technology investment at Goldman Sachs, advising software, internet, and fintech companies on strategic transactions.

Torres also worked for more than 5 years at Google, Uber, and IDEO CoLab. In addition, Nancy is a co-founder of the Latinx MBA Association, an organization of over 1,000 members dedicated to promoting business leadership in the Latinx community.

“Nancy and Kathy are wonderfully aligned with Ulu’s mission to champion diverse business teams that are challenged by the biggest issues and opportunities. Clint and I couldn’t be happier with the intellectual curiosity, rigor, integrity, and empathy that they bring to the Ulu community,” Miriam Rivera highlighted.

Ulu, who has three diverse women in top leadership roles, where more than 75% of the entrepreneurs in his three funds are diverse, also highlighted how “currently only 1% of venture capital investment partners are Latina, and just 3% are Asian American and Pacific Islander women.”

“The recent hiring of George Sanchez and Serena Rivera-Korver as analysts continues to increase Ulu’s internal diversity metrics, while expanding support to a larger number of Latinx entrepreneurs, as well as those based in New York, where Sanchez and Rivera-Korver are based,” said Ulu.

Ulu Ventures is one of the leading venture capital firms focused on enterprise IT startups, with a track record of appropriate expansion into other critical sectors.

Ulu generates excellent financial results using a disciplined and repeatable decision-making process that looks at risk-return tradeoffs and also reduces cognitive bias.

More than three-quarters of the entrepreneurs in the three funds that this firm operates are diverse. Ulu’s investment thesis is based on the proven concept that diversity pays.